Can you guarantee Business Continuity?

Can you guarantee Business Continuity in a power cut?

Businesses can now add the threat of potential rolling blackouts to the long list of challenges they are already facing this winter (and in the future).

Why is this more important now?

It’s all part of the current energy crisis that we find ourselves facing. The threat to energy supplies concerns several factors, including:

• Climate change
• Overconsumption
• Disruption of supplies caused by the war in Ukraine
• Russia’s ‘gas games’ (including the closing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline),
• The UK’s reliance on imported energy

…and closer to home, and the aging of our energy infrastructure throughout the UK.

With the threat to supply and the natural increase in demand during colder months, rolling blackouts could now be a bleak possibility this winter. The National Grid ESO has released its Winter Outlook Report detailing several scenarios, including reduced gas and electricity supply. The outcome of these scenarios includes “planned interruptions of electricity supply to businesses and households”. The report also states that these scenarios are unlikely. However, the risk is genuine, which is why these plans are in place.

Power outages are already relatively common throughout the winter in the UK, especially during stormy weather. So, businesses must ask themselves, “Are we fully prepared, and can we guarantee Business Continuity if the worst happens?”

What should businesses be doing to prepare?

Power outages are in the same group as any disaster or cyber-attack where the impact on IT infrastructure and data loss are critical risks. The interruption of power supplies could result in an unpleasant experience that can have a devastating financial and reputational impact on your organisation and the people who depend upon it. Power outages should, therefore, always be included as part of an overall Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan.

Some of the other areas that businesses could prepare and take additional measures in are:

• Implementation of regular Offsite or Cloud Backups.
• Identification of High Availability & Recovery Time and Point Objectives (RTPO).
• Development of an Incident Response Plan
• Appropriate and regular testing of all the above.

How can Covenco help, and what measures have we put in place in case of a blackout?

Covenco can assist in any of the above services, and we have over 25 years of experience in Disaster Recovery and Data Backup to give you that extra peace of mind. If the worst was to happen and we find ourselves without power, you can rest assured that your business-critical data is safe with us. Your data will remain fully backed up and secure across our two ISO 20071-accredited UK data centres at Banbury and Langley.

To ensure the continuity of power supplies, we maintain a set of power generators with more than enough capacity to run our data centres. Additionally, we have recently installed a second parallel UPS at Banbury to increase our resilience. The setup also includes an AMF (Auto Mains Failure) panel, which detects a loss of incoming mains power and transfers the load to the generator. It takes approximately 30 seconds for the generators to start and stabilise automatically, during that time, our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) keeps all the attached equipment running as usual. The generators can run for approximately 48 hours with a typical workload, at which point they only need to be re-fuelled. Not only that but they are also tested every month and serviced twice a year, which is a prerequisite for our ISO 27001 accreditation.

Customer Case Study

Covenco has worked with many customers to implement and test data centre fail-over plans. One such customer is Bell & Clements, a leading insurance underwriter. Bell & Clements regularly test their Disaster Recovery plans, including data fail-over to Covenco’s servers, and the Covenco process consistently exceeds its recovery point objectives:

With such a critical dependency on our IT infrastructure, our business users have a very limited tolerance of the risk of ‘downtime’. Covenco’s exceptional knowledge of our backup solution, which we had already selected independently, enabled them to deliver a much-improved fail-over capability to their DR site. Mark Balcombe, IT Manager and Associate Director, Bell & Clements.

Read the entire case study here

Learn more about Covenco’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services here, and don’t forget to get in touch via the form below to discuss what’s best for your business needs.

Covenco has over 25 years of experience helping organisations create and manage bespoke data protection and management solutions that work for them and their unique circumstances.