Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

We live in a connected world which is increasingly being run by fewer companies. Whether it is cable, mobile or financial services, the number of companies offering solutions is dwindling to a handful or less. What this means is any time there is a problem, such as the service disruption of Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange Online that took place recently, it affects a large number of people.

In a report written by Michael Endler of InformationWeek regarding the incident, Microsoft had little to say, but Endler delivered a thorough analysis of the problems cloud services are facing and will face, the need for companies to be transparent, and customer service.

When the outage took place customers were not notified nor did the company release any type of statements regarding the disruption. Since cloud technology is in its infancy, Microsoft had a great opportunity to establish a good relationship with its customers by coming out and fully explaining the situation and giving an approximate timetable of the resolution. Instead, users were relegated to forums and social media to speculate as to what had happened.

Microsoft issued the following statement after the issue was resolved, "On Tuesday, June 24th, 2014, at approximately 6:30 AM EDT, some North American customers experienced email delays with Exchange Online. The issue has since been resolved and the service is now functioning normally. We sincerely apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this incident may have caused and continuously strive to improve our service."

This incident proves our reliance on digital technology and electricity dictates for us to be prepared by implementing redundant measures so we can have the resources we need at all times. This means backing up the data in your system on backup drives and cloud storage with several providers.

Power management is also extremely important, especially to critical components such as servers and backup systems. When choosing an uninterruptible power supply system (UPS), selecting the right size to provide adequate power for the infrastructure that is in place is key.

As Minuteman Marketing Coordinator Samantha Wade wrote in a recent blog post, "Size matters, but … the right size for the right application matters. When it comes to UPS sizing, Minuteman is and has always been ahead of the game. With our SizeMyUPS tool, finding the right size UPS for any application has never been easier."