Alison Campbell-Boreham is the editor of The Power Protection Guide and provides PR services to Riello UPS Ltd, the UK subsidiary of Riello UPS (RPS S.p.A). For more information visit the Riello UPS - uninterruptible power supplies website.
Business continuity (BC) has scaled the heights of the boardroom agenda to become the business issue of the 21st century. Companies are realising that ‘downtime’ – for whatever reason - is unacceptable. Reputation, turnover and a business’ very existence can be determined by its ability to respond to any operational disruption – whatever the cause!
Causes of operational disruption can be many and various; freak weather conditions, terrorist attacks, public order disturbances, criminal activity, accidents and so forth. The list is endless but, thankfully, most of these occurrences are rare.
One phenomenon that occurs with increasing frequency, however, is power failure. Its effects can be just as devastating and an obstacle to business continuity. Power problems and power cuts are now the most common cause of business disruption according to research by business continuity provider SunGard.
In July 2006, The Secretary of State’s Second Report to Parliament on Security of Gas and Electricity Supply in Great Britain from the DTI, Between April 2005 and March 2006, the total number of customer interruptions was around 21 million and total number of customer minutes lost 1,966 million.
Power continuity is normally part of a business continuity strategy but given the fact that businesses are more likely to suffer a power cut than a terrorist attack, shouldn’t it be the central theme?
The Business Continuity Institute in the UK defines BC as ‘the process, procedures, decisions and activities to ensure that an organisation can continue to function through an operational interruption’. The same could be said for power continuity. Without power continuity there is no business continuity.
So, how do you plan a power continuity strategy?
It starts with an assessment of the systems and equipment that are the bedrock of operational requirements; computers, telecommunications, electrical machinery, building management systems, entry systems, lighting, heating, cooling and so forth. They must be categorised into critical, essential and none-essential loads (load being the electrical requirement each one carries).
Critical loads directly affect the ability of an organisation to operate and must either be kept running when their mains power supply fails or be powered down in an orderly manner to prevent system crashes, data corruption and hardware damage.
Essential loads provide secondary support services that may be required for health and safety reasons (air-conditioning, emergency lighting and heating) or to maintain ambient temperature levels but they are not critical to the continuity of the business.
Non-essential loads are those that an organisation can afford to lose when the mains power supply fails such as general lighting and printing services.
Critical and essential loads need some kind of back-up power protection, usually UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), such as those provides by specialist suppliers like Riello UPS, with perhaps a diesel generator or some form of alternative energy source attached.
Why have a UPS and not just a back-up generator?
UPS does far more than just breaching the gap between power failure and generator start-up (which can be up to ten minutes in some cases). By nature of its online technology, a UPS will condition and stabilize a fluctuating mains supply and keep it to within a regulated and acceptable level, continuously, as well as on generator start-up, and cushion against many power problems such as sags, surges, brownouts, harmonics, flicker, frequency deviations, interference, interruptions, distortion and of course complete blackouts, which are associated with raw mains energy.
With reliance upon electronic equipment now critical to business (be it computer systems, telecoms equipment or manufacturing machinery), companies are spending more of their operational budgets on it. Preserving its life, therefore, is paramount. Computer systems, particularly, are sensitive to fluctuations in voltage current, which can result in data corruption or loss or even complete breakdown.
As with business continuity, a power continuity strategy will contain similar elements of planning, management and operation and what needs to be done in each case to guard against the inevitable power outage, which can strike at anytime and last from less than a second to several days depending on severity and cause. Businesses that protect against this by installing UPS and back-up power systems should see it as an investment in their long-term future and it should always be foremost in any business continuity policy.
For a comprehensive and (uniquely) comprehensible overview of power continuity read The Power Protection Guide.
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