Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

If you live in an area that occasionally gets hit by bad weather, power outages and all their attendant problems are to be expected. But if you live in a major metropolitan area, you might expect any such outages to be quickly rectified. Isn’t that the point of living in big city? Good, fast service?

The residents of Detroit, Michigan, might beg to disagree, and a power outage last week drives home the point.

According to a posting on Michigan website M Live.com, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said the power outage serves as a reminder to the people of Detroit about how much they need to improve in the way the city is run. Duggan said that “poor infrastructure is completely at fault for this,” and that the power grid of Detroit hasn’t “been modernized in decades.” The power outage, which closed schools and rendered essential facilities like prisons and fire departments useless, has shown the people of Detroit “how much we still have to do to restore order.”

Power was eventually restored to the city after a time, but at the outage’s height, the failure of one single power cable shut down nearly 115 buildings that get their juice from the Detroit Public Lighting Department. Included were police stations, Wayne State University and Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Worse, many businesses suffered from the sudden shutdown, and some are still scrambling to restore or rebuild needed files. Such an outage only serves to drive home the point that an uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, is needed by businesses large or small. Uninterruptible power supplies and solutions like surge protection, remote power management devices and power distribution units (PDUs) can go a long way toward ensuring business systems stay functional during an outage, so that customers are not inconvenienced and revenues aren’t lost.

Power outages are a fact of life, but losing precious files doesn’t have to be part and parcel of that. Unfortunately, it’s the user and not the provider that needs to make sure they’re prepared.