Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Think about it: What would you do if you lost access to your email? Did that question spur a minor panic attack?

For many of us, a loss of email could mean we’re down and out until access is restored. We use it to not only stay connected, but to keep the wheels of capitalism turning. To some, it may seem like a minor thing, but in business, you can’t be out of touch.

In the state of Ohio, an outage led to more than just being out of touch. A statewide email outage actually wiped out more than 2,600 email accounts throughout the state’s library system. While a power outage would take out the lights and access to anything electronic, power protection could get you back on track. When you lose email accounts altogether, recovery is much more painful.

The source of the Ohio libraries’ problems was an email server that was hit with an unrecoverable failure. While recovery attempts were made using backups, the restoration efforts were unsuccessful. Now, efforts are in place to provide all affected libraries with access to alternative email providers, doing away with in-house email service, according to Peter Kuebeck of the Sentinel Tribune.

This outage points to a very real problem any company could have if the proper power protection is not in place. While a server outage could occur outside of simple power failures, the reality is that we rely heavily on email communication channels and a failure to protect the server or have adequate backup could leave us handicapped if an outage occurs.

As such, we often put protections in place to ensure we don’t lose data when a power outage occurs. We know that being down and out for too long makes it a challenge to get back online and keep operations going. The company that has no effective business continuity plan in place could easily find itself out of business if recovery takes too long to achieve.

Likewise, an email sent without response could lead to a lost sale, a lost customer or a lost opportunity that affects other areas of the business. And, when an email server goes down, there is no way to set automated messages to ensure the individual sending the email understands why you haven’t responded.

As we rely so heavily on technology to support our business processes, we cannot afford to cut corners on power protection. Whether it’s to protect your email server, keep your data center up and running or simply ensuring your office employees can turn on the lights, putting the right protections in place are important. After all, you never know when the next message sent could effectively be the last on that server. Don’t leave business communications and operations to chance – invest in power protection.