It’s the middle of the summer, which means fun outdoor activities and long sunny days. It also means record-high heat waves, like Alberta’s hot spell in July 2024. This season can also bring other weather-related disasters like wildfires, tornadoes, and flash floods. These types of incidences can strain, damage, or even knock out electrical grids and lead to power outages that disrupt your IT and business operations.
Fortunately, there are several measures you can implement to prepare your systems to withstand the impacts of extreme weather events. In this article, you’ll learn tangible actions your business can take to boost its resilience and sustain your operational continuity.
Seven tactics to keep your business’s IT systems resilient
Here are a few best practices to maintain your system functionality, prevent data loss, and experience minimal impact on your productivity during an outage. We also recommend executing these suggestions while leveraging the professional services and IT support of a managed services provider to help guide you through the planning and execution of these projects.
- Implement an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) solution
Investing in an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) system will give you immediate short-term backup power to your critical equipment during an outage. If you experience an extended outage, a UPS system also helps you gracefully transition to more robust backup generators. You can also safely shut down your devices and hardware to prevent data loss and equipment damage caused by a lack of power to your technology.
- Establish a data backup protocol
It’s also important to proactively prevent data loss by implementing a regular data backup protocol. This is a key data management best practice that provides a second layer of protection to prevent data loss. When your business frequently backs up its critical data to secure off-site and cloud locations, it can be accessed for quick restoration to minimize downtime.
- Develop a disaster recovery plan
You will benefit from a disaster recovery plan that includes clear, step-by-step procedures for maintaining your operations and recovering your systems during any outage.
Reflect on your organization’s distinct operational environment, and consider:
- How will you communicate it to employees and customers?
- What’s your process for switching to your backup power sources?
- What must you do to verify your data’s health or re-boot your systems post-recovery?
Importantly, update the plan regularly to keep it effective! Your business and IT infrastructure evolves over time with new software, hardware, and other adjustments to business processes. The plan should always align with your current operations.
- Install power surge protection
During a heat wave or other extreme weather event, you’ll be secured if you have surge protection on your IT hardware and other business machines. A surge protector prevents power fluctuations from damaging their systems and sensitive devices.
Without one, power surges may cause damage to your machines as fluctuating voltages rise above hardware specifications. At best, this puts extra strain on your machine’s components, degrading performance quality, and at worst, damaging the machine.
- Create network redundancy
Part of building your system resilience involves focusing on organizational network security. Beyond implementing protection measures like a VPN, firewalls, and regular application updates, establishing network redundancy can also keep your systems reliable and safe even during an outage.
Network redundancy is a process of creating multiple pathways for traffic and data to flow in case one component fails. This may include relying on more than one internet service provider or having multiple backup systems. These fail-safes allow you to reroute data to your network.
- Build capacity for employees to work remotely.
For your team to work productively if your office loses power, you should proactively establish processes to enable your employees to work from home. You can make it easy by furnishing them with the necessary resources, like laptops, and access to essential business software and data.
Training your staff on remote work cybersecurity best practices will also be key to giving them the skills to protect your data from external threats, no matter where they complete their tasks.
- Migrate to the cloud.
Mitigating the risks associated with power outages is much easier when your organization uses cloud services to host its critical applications and data storage. These providers typically have robust redundancy and failover capabilities, meaning if one of their data centers also experiences a power failure, they can keep your resources continuously available.
As a result, your employees can access what they need from anywhere with an internet connection.
And there are two bonuses here:
1) You will have the infrastructure in place to accommodate changing business needs without needing to invest in additional storage hardware or processing power.
2) Your team can collaborate remotely in real time and ramp up their productivity.
Prepare your IT infrastructure with PC Corp’s managed IT services
From developing a disaster recovery plan to establishing robust backup practices, building a resilient IT infrastructure that can keep your operations running smoothly during a power outage can be complex.
Unfortunately, heat waves and other weather events aren’t going anywhere. A proactive approach is your best defense to overcoming these incidents with minimal stress.
When you partner with PC Corp to support your technology needs, you can rely on our managed IT services, IT procurement services, and projects teams working together to prepare and guide you through IT challenges, from sourcing UPS solutions to supporting cloud migrations.
