Your IT Manager has just told you these events happen "all the time", "with great regularity" and are always "a surprise".

When it does happen, your IT Manager will calmly tell you that the XYZ Power Company is at fault. They did not warn of the outage in advance and continue to tell you that they were never given the authority to properly do their job and buy sufficient equipment and they are not responsible.

Let's see what happens in the real world:

• Expect the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to be called upon at the most inconvenient time. This could be part way through a critical software upgrade
• Expect that the UPS are rated to provide only a few minutes operation. Majority critical software upgrades often take 10 times longer
• Expect that the UPS battery packs have aged since installation and will function only for a fraction of their rated time. This will render them useless
• Expect that not all your business critical systems are provided with a UPS in the first place
• Expect that as the mains power turns on/off intermittently the power supply within several critical systems fails permanently. This will be initially unnoticed
• Expect that when the mains power supply finally stabilises that not all critical equipment will restart "correctly" and automatically enter "operational mode". Manual intervention will be required
• Expect that the "check lists" used to manually bring equipment to an operational state were written by your previous IT Manager. These check lists may not apply to all installed equipment and may only be understood by the original author, who is no longer employed

Expect the unexpected and be prepared.

See our next update on IT and Business Continuity where we will discuss what to check when unexpected occurs.

This article was sourced directly from IVT.