Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Businesses and residents in the downtown Denver area were several power outages Wednesday evening.  According to Xcel Energy, 48 different outages impacted almost 11,000 customers in the downtown area at the outage’s peak.  The outage happened when heavy winds blew debris into a local substation. 

The outage resulted in many challenges in business areas, including surveillance cameras being inoperable and many people stuck in elevators.  Commuters had to deal with traffic lights being out as well as train delays due to power being out at Union Station.

Electricity is not working at Union Station @9NEWS #Denver pic.twitter.com/jDvYfRXzJ0

— Jos� V�squez (@chewbacca115) October 4, 2018

Xcel was able to restore power to most customers within about two hours, but the outage and impact on business equipment serves as a reminder that just about every business requires electricity to function – including not only elevators and cameras, but all operational systems.  While power was restored relatively quickly, considering the number of outages reported, sensitive technology is always at risk. 

The problem outages present is their impact on the ultra-sensitive circuitry that makes technology function.  Even minor surges without outages can weaken the circuits – and larger spikes often associated with outages can break them instantly.  The result is a failure of those systems that have been damaged and potentially lengthy downtime to determine the cause of the failure and get a technician out to repair the damage and restore systems to normal operational parameters.  If parts or replacement servers, switches or other components aren’t immediately available, the downtime could be extended by days or weeks – and that’s not even touching on the cost of repairs of replacement, or lost business opportunity due to downtime.

That’s why power protection systems are a must for any business relying on its IT capabilities.  They are designed to regulate power before it’s distributed to systems to ensure spikes and surges do not cause any damage.  Their UPS capability can also provide power to allow systems to be manually shut down to prevent data loss, or extended runtime options can even keep systems operational throughout outages.

Businesses must look beyond the mere disruption of not having power for an hour or two and recognize the greater damage potential of power outages.  There’s no way to predict outages, and the only way to safeguard against them is to install power protection systems.