As a result of COVID-19, we have to broaden our definition of disaster preparedness to include events that might not impact the physical world or our facilities but that still leave us operating in a changed environment — one that requires rapid responses and flexibility.
Whether it’s sudden disruption from innovation, a natural disaster, or a pandemic forcing people to stay home, business must continue, and this means networking systems and processes must anticipate unexpected change.
As organizations in all sectors have rapidly emptied their offices and sent their employees home to comply with ever more expansive shelter-in-place and quarantine mandates, replicating the full breadth of services remotely has been IT’s singular priority.
The Coronavirus / COVID-19 outbreak is a human tragedy with very real business and economic consequences. Business leaders globally are in uncharted territory as, together, we face the challenges surrounding the recent pandemic and resulting economic impact.
Questions and answers from Uptime Institute’s webinar
April 3, 2020
On March 18, Uptime Institute hosted the webinar COVID-19: Minimizing critical facility risk. Much of the content was based on the Uptime Institute report COVID-19: Minimizing critical facility risk.
Here, you’ll find the questions attendees submitted and the corresponding answers provided by Uptime Institute experts.
It wasn’t that long ago that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) implemented rolling blackouts throughout California in an effort to prevent wildfires — an unprecedented move in the U.S. It raised the question of how companies that rely on networks to run their businesses prepare for power outages.
Fire is the second-leading cause of failure (after power issues), according to a 2015 Capitoline survey, and the risk is increasing as greater power densities (20-plus kW per rack) are housed in more confined spaces.
Whether enterprise, colocation, or edge data centers, no other facility is host to the sheer amount of business-critical information that data centers hold, and, therefore, no other facility faces as significant a business consequence in the event of a power outage.
Whether an organization starts out with a modest, on-premises IT infrastructure or uses a public cloud provider to meet its data and networking needs, it will eventually reach a point where that solution is no longer viable.