15th June 2010

I read with interest the reports from NASA that the Earth will be affected by a huge space storm during the next few years. See here http://ht.ly/1YDdu

The article describes how there is a possibility of months without power and what the effect of that would be. For most businesses, mine included, such an outage would be devastating. I hope it does not come to that. What the article does highlight is that we cannot rely on power all the time.

There are various reasons why power would fail and we see it all the time where companies have power failures and it can badly affect their business. All businesses should take step to ensure they can survive a power surge or an outage.

So what does a big business do to protect itself? Corporate businesses spend a lot of money on ensuring they have clean and constant power supplies. I used to work for a company that had its own power station building. Effectively this was 4 massive generators and an underground Diesel reservoir .The power building had huge batteries that took the load as the generators where starting up. That way they could survive for up to 3 months with no power and of course they could top up the diesel. They also had power supplies from the national grid coming in from two directions.

OK so that's a bit out of reach for most SME's but if you understand the ultimate you can consider how you can implement some level of power protection into your business. Therefore you should consider the following.

• 1. Batteries called UPS's (Uninterruptable Power Supplies) to cover all vital equipment, don't forget to protect your telephone system your switch work and of course your server. Some companies also cover the PC's so they can cope with a short blip without crashing.
• 2. A generator (especially if your office is in a remote location).
• 3. As an alternative to a generator, another location you could move to, potentially putting your servers in a data centre and having a system where everybody could work from home.
• 4. Have surge protection on your electrical devices (non-UPS ones)

UPS's as well as providing standby power do 2 other vital things. They smooth out power supply and they will also shut down equipment to stop it just crashing out when the battery dies.

I hope we do not get extreme power outages, but you never know and it's the companies that think ahead and plan that will survive, this is true of all the dangers that lurk out there for us business owners.

"Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning" - Winston Churchill