Assess Your Exposure to Risk of Power Damage
This assessment will help you determine the appropriate level of protection needed and justify the cost of power-protection equipment, and will help you see if you need an electrician to rectify problems in your building and to reconfigure circuits, such as isolating computers from machines:
- Does the business experience frequent power failures?
- Is there frequent construction going on near or inside of the company’s facilities?
- Are facilities located in areas where severe weather events occur, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and snow/ice/hail storms?
- Is the distribution wiring in the facilities over 20 years old?
- Do the facilities have emergency generators, and do they supply power to critical systems and network equipment outlets? (Note: Oftentimes generators are in place, but they supply power only to emergency lighting, some elevators, and critical building infrastructure systems, not to tenants or occupants.)
- Are the computers isolated from circuits that supply “heavy use” devices (e.g. motors, compressors, air conditioners and laser printers)? Even a simple pencil sharpener can be dangerous.
- If there is a facility generator, does it provide clean, filtered power suitable for computers?
- When the business experiences downtime, is personnel time wasted or does the outage impact the revenue stream?
- Has the company performed a cost-of-downtime assessment?
- Does the company have mission-critical business networks, systems, and/or processes that must be operational 24/7?
