Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Power protection has been critical to the communications industry because it acts as the backbone of several mission-critical services across all industry verticals.

Without adequate power protection, an outage can cause serious damage to property and human lives, in addition to the financial loss it brings to businesses.

Recently Neverfail, a provider of IT continuity management solutions, highlighted some of the top outages in the industry. Top among them include Microsoft Windows Azure's outage on October 30, Google's outage on August 16, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) outage on September 13, and NASDAQ’s outage on August 22.

The Windows Azure outage lasted for more than 20 hours, due to a sub-component of the system failing worldwide. Google’s (News - Alert) outage caused global Internet traffic volume to plunge by nearly 40 percent, with the site going down for only about five minutes. The AWS outage lasted three hours while NASDAQ’s outage caused by a software bug affected trading across the U.S for nearly three hours.

"Whether reality or perception, it seems as though there are more outages today than ever," said Martin Mackay (News - Alert), CEO of Neverfail. "With the consolidation in the cloud market -- and imperfect human operators who are tasked with managing it all -- we are going to keep seeing both small and large issues impacting not only a company's uptime, but consumers' user experiences."

As the industry relies heavily on services like AWS and Google Cloud, the role of power protection solutions is higher than before. Cloud services today act as the backbone of IT in many companies, so a minor outage could result in massive failure in services across many verticals.

"Given our heavy reliance on technology today, there is more at stake than ever before. Outages affect not only internal users, but a company's customers and partners -- and impact revenue, credibility, trust, reputation and productivity," said Mackay.

Based on these findings, Neverfail is offering a few suggestions to companies looking to protect themselves from outages in 2014.

First, they should have a failover plan and reduce reliance on the cloud for mission-critical processes. They should understand the dependencies and vulnerabilities that threaten availability and put in place plans to ensure full continuity to meet the real end-user requirements of constant access. Finally they should identify risks before they become a problem to make sure business continuity plans will work as expected should a failure occur.