Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

No doubt you’ve been following Sony’s travails with what is probably the most egregious security breach in... well, in the Internet age. Hackers got millions of names, physical and email addresses and birth dates of users, including PlayStation Network and Qriocity log-in details and heaven knows what else.

That took it offline for weeks. The company is gingerly restoring its PlayStation after last month’s attacks; PlayStation Network in the Americas, Europe and most of Asia should be up in the next few days.

But they want you, their customer, to know they’re really sorry, and they want to make it up to you. So in fine Japanese style they’re offering gifts – pretty good ones. Say what you will about the lax security that led to the breaches, they’re trying to make it right with their customers.

According to a Data Center Dynamics article, Sony’s giving away game and movie downloads “and other content users usually have to pay for.”

That’s one of the more dramatic examples of downtime in recent memory. Let’s hope that you’re never subjected to such attacks, but there are more mundane reasons for losing business from being down like Sony did. And probably far more preventable ones, including power protection technology.

Power protection generally costs a few hundred bucks. A veritable pittance compared to what money you could be losing if you go down for any length of time. According to a recent article on TMCnet, “One study conducted by J.D. Power & Associates found that the average business experiences 5.7 outages per year,” according to Duston Nixon, marketing communications specialist for power protection vendor Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert).

And as Nixon said actual power outages “only account for about five percent of power problems,” with other assorted maladies as sags/brownouts, surges, and spikes shortening equipment life and corrupting data.

A study by The Electric Power Research Institute found that, on average, a one second power outage costs a business $1,477, and the tab for a one hour outage comes to $7,795. Overall, this costs the U.S. economy between $104 and $164 billion annually.

So it’s probably a good idea to cough up a few hundred bucks for power protection.

“The initial cost of most of our UPS products can be easily recovered the first time an outage occurs,” Nixon told TMCnet. “This is true for our lowest priced offerings, the EnSpire Series Standby, which can support a desktop PC or network equipment, as it is for our enterprise-level Endeavor Series, which can support an entire network or server system.”