Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Power outages are never fun, as they leave those affected wondering when they will be able to get back to work, play or everyday life. Whether a big storm has built up in the area or a transformer is compromised, power protection can assure that your processes are preserved for that time when the lights come back on.

When that power is lost by a giant like Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable in the form of Internet service, the impact is more than significant. A massive network outage last week left more than 11 million businesses and residences without service, prompting an investigation by New York State.

A Fox Business news piece reported the outage across 29 states, which began at 4:30 a.m. (EDT) on Wednesday, Aug. 27. This outage affected the cable operator’s network, which was restored by 7:30 a.m., according to Bobby Amirshahi, a company spokesperson. Given that Time Warner is focused on winning FCC approval for a $45 billion merger with Comcast (News - Alert), this outage could not have come at a worse time.

While power protection is advised for any enterprise, this particular network outage was blamed on a technical glitch. The network reportedly returned an “erroneous configuration” response when technicians conducted maintenance on the Internet backbone considered to be routine. Such a failure is significant and Amirshahi claims the cable giant is taking the necessary steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

The planned merger with Comcast is one of the reasons why New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the investigation by the state’s Department of Public Service. Internet service is now considered a vital link in the daily lives of individuals and its dependability is crucial. As such, telecommunications companies have a responsibility to deliver service that is both consistent and reliable.

Time Warner has been on the hook in the past for network outages. In fact, this current outage occurred just one day after the company had agreed to pay $1.1 million to U.S. regulators who discovered that the company had not properly disclosed multiple network outages in the previous year. Not surprisingly, the issue has been a point of contention with a number of Time Warner customers. It doesn’t help that customers typically are not reimbursed for disruptions and typically receive little to no information about service restorations when they occur.

The moral of this story, of course, is that networks and power can go down at any time, without warning. If your organization isn’t ready with the right power protection, you could easily lose important hardware, connections or data, rendering your business out of operation until it can be restored. If you don’t want this to be your reality, take the necessary steps now.