Power Outages: Do You Have A Plan
For This Frequent "Disaster"

  Introduction: In the depths of Winter or the heat of summer, power outages are common. They're unpredictable and happen without warning. These are often caused by weather events and where our office is located, wild fires. In some parts of the country, extremely cold weather, high winds, freezing temperatures, and falling trees can take out power to large areas without warning. Add to this rolling blackouts when there is too much demand for power and grid maintenance that causes unintended problems, and it almost makes sense when we're caught off guard by a power outage.

  Timing is critical - Let's say there is a big storm on a Sunday night and the power turns off at your office. You're relaxing at home, perhaps reading or watching TV. If the power never goes off at your home, you may not think to check in at your office. But, if the power does go off at your home, it will probably trigger you to think about your office. This could happen during the week, but we've noticed the weekend power outages seem to have the biggest impact on our clients.

  Duration is important - A short power outage of only a few minutes may have little or no affect on your office. If you've got good battery backups with enough power to last longer than the outage and all important equipment properly connected your system could be fine. But, if you don't have battery backups or the outage lasts longer than you battery backups can run the systems, you could have a disaster on your hands.

  Check-In At The Office - We all have the habit of "checking out" when we're not at work. If you're experiencing a storm or high-heat conditions, sign on to your remote access. You're not signing in to check email or finish tasks for a deadline. This is a simple check on the computer system. If it's online and responding the system is up and running. This simple check lets you know your computer system is working. This is info that will help you navigate the situation. But, as with most disasters, things change rapidly and this is just check to give you information about the computer system. If the power outage is extended it is worth it to check often.

  Battery Backups - Battery backups are a reliable tool for reducing the impact of a power outage. A good battery back up may keep an important piece of equiment running until the power returns. Many off the shelf devices will give you 30 minutes to an hour of runtime. The runtime is based on how much power the equipment plugged into the battery backup demands. In many cases, the runtime is long enough for the power to come back. In other cases, the battery backup will signal your server or other equipment that it should be prepared to shutdown because the power is off.

  Auto Restart - Many workstations have an "auto-restart" feature. It is a low-level feature that is activated throught the BIOS of the computer. When the feature is turned on, the computer will restart itself automaticaslly after the power returns. This is a helpful feature when you have remote workers who are logging into physical workstations instead of virtual workstations. If your remote workers are using virutalized workstations and the server is set to restart the virtual sessions on restart, then the obvious task is to make sure the server restarts properly.

  No Auto Restart - Many devices don't have an autorestart feature. An important feature of your disaster plan is to have a strategy to get these devices restarted. This could be a simple as designating someone to be on-call. This person will know that their task is to go into the office and restart specific devices. At the other end of the spectrum, your plan could be that users will wait until the next business day for specific devices. Having a plan in place means you and your staff don't have to think about what to do when the time comes.

   A Simple Disaster Plan - This is boring stuff! It doesn't give you the same satsifaction as knocking out a business goal or bringing on a big customer or expanding a territory. Disaster planning is one of those things that you'll be glad you did after something happens. Until then... Well. Put together a simple plan for the next power outage. It could be as simple as a designated person to call the power company for an ETA, or a person who has the job of alerting the rest of the staff to the issue.

We have a simple call tree for disasters. When the designated person gets a call, he/she checks whether the remote access systems are online. If not, their next task is to notify remote workers and advise them that the systems are down and to wait until we know more before calling other managers or service providers. It is simple, but when the power went out the last time, it kept our remote staff from panicing.

  This past winter, one of our clients had a power outage. It was one of those storms that the Weather person talked about for 3 days prior to its arrival. Everyone knew it was coming and I'd say everyone was as prepared as possible. But, as with any weather system, there are always surprises This storm knocked down a few trees and took out a few powerlines. It wasn't a disaster on the scale of a hurricane or earthquake. But, the power went out and that is the reason it is a good example. Our client had a battery backup serving the internet gateway, a router, and a server. This power outage lasted longer than the battery backups for the server and computers. But, the router, switches, and ISP modem were on seperate battery backups which mean the network infrastructure remained on.

   Fortunately, there was a plan in place. In this case, the plan started with putting the network on seperate battery backups. Then, the call tree went into action. Due to the nature of this client's operations, there were employees on call for other services the business provided to it's clients and that meant when the power went out, there was someone onsite to restart the computers that went down.

Do You Have A Plan? Make a simple plan for your office or team. Incorporate your office's priorities (i.e. customer service, remote worker connections, etc) Set up your battery backups so that the most important devices on the network can remain on as long as posssible when there is no power. Check the internet for examples of disaster plans.