Building a disaster preparedness strategy? Here’s How Top Service Providers Can Help

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Recently, risk modeling firm RMS estimated that Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia in September, could inflict insured losses on the private market. up to $74 billion. Further inland flooding and storm surges could result in additional losses of $10 billion. The worrying aspect is that this is not a stand-alone event. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the intensity of North Atlantic cyclones has “increased dramatically over the past 20 years, and eight of the 10 most active years since 1950 have occurred since the mid 1990s”.

Although businesses rely on insurance to cover losses caused by extreme events, they still have to rebuild everything from scratch, and in some cases the insurance coverage may not be sufficient. Therefore, in recent times, companies have started relying more on business continuity plans with disaster preparedness at their core for good reason.

According to Eaton, North American businesses lose $700 billion a year to downtime, with weather-related outages costing the economy between $18 billion and $33 billion a year. The average cost per minute of a data center outage also rose to $8,851, a 38% increase since 2010. Between 2000 and 2017, 19 weather-related network disruptions also affected more than one million customers.

Homemade disaster recovery plans don’t work

Organizations must have robust disaster recovery plans and protocols in place to protect their IT infrastructures against unforeseen and disruptive events. However, that is easier said than done. There are many reasons why organizations fall victim to disasters despite having plans in place. These may include a lack of coordination and communication from IT staff responsible for critical applications, databases and ERP systems, a lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities, the absence contingency plans in test environments and an inability to accurately estimate the cost of downtime or the cost of recovery.

According to IDC’s white paper, “The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022,” up to 93% of organizations experienced data-related business disruption in twelve months, forcing many challenge their existing backup and disaster recovery solutions. He also found that inadequate disaster recovery planning led to lost employee productivity, lost revenue, and higher recovery costs (see Figure 1 below). The IDC study, based on a survey of more than 500 respondents from medium and large enterprises in North America and Western Europe, found that following an outage event activity, only 28% of respondents expressed 100% confidence in their backup systems. ‘ to recover the data, and only 29% had 100% confidence in their DR solution to recover the data. As a result, 79% of these organizations have strong disaster recovery strategies in place to prevent further downtime.

Why you need reliable and expert partners to build resilient disaster preparedness strategies

Given the severe impact of unplanned events on business continuity, organizations of all sizes and representing different industries need to work closely with partners with the necessary disaster recovery expertise to get operations back up and running. in no time. Eaton suggests that investing in a disaster prevention application will allow business owners to proactively manage, monitor and determine corrective actions before power outages that can help reduce or avoid the cost of recovery. .

Here are a few reasons why working with a qualified first response service provider can help organizations be optimally prepared for unforeseen disaster scenarios:

1. The service provider can identify critical areas of your business that need to be running at all times. This helps them develop a contract that covers insurance and training needs, the requirement for additional services in times of crisis, and to put in place the necessary equipment and manpower commensurate with the task at hand. .
2. The first response service provider can conduct a pre-crisis risk mitigation audit to estimate the potential impact of credible disaster scenarios and identify ways to minimize vulnerability in the event of a disaster.
3. The service provider may also perform a safety audit and, based on its findings, establish procedures to ensure injury-free repair.
4. With its on-time disaster recovery expertise, the service provider can help organizations comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) requirements.
5. The service provider has expertise in the critical staging of support equipment, including generators, equipment and satellite communication networks. It can also assist in the recovery, life extension and/or replacement of equipment with full manufacturing capabilities, regardless of manufacturer.

The good news is that there are reliable and experienced players in the field who have the expertise to estimate the extent of exposure to extreme events and ensure business continuity.

Eaton’s disaster response services, for example, ensure companies have a recovery plan and the support needed to resume production quickly and safely. The company’s field technicians are seasoned experts who can help restore emergency power systems quickly and safely. Eaton’s expertise in implementing a proactive and comprehensive disaster response program will help it achieve its availability goals and avoid financial loss.

The company’s disaster response services provide organizations with a host of benefits, such as remote monitoring services, preventive maintenance and support services, UPS upgrades (kVA, power-saving system, firmware), Eaton replacement batteries, multi-vendor services (support for other manufacturers’ products), and factory-certified spare parts.

For example, Eaton’s Distributed Infrastructure Management (DIM) software, part of the company’s Brightlayer Data Centers suite, provides the tools needed to monitor and manage power devices in physical or virtual. This helps IT managers to remotely monitor, manage and control UPSs, PDUs, servers and other storage devices on the network. It also helps enterprises and SMBs preserve functionality of key assets by disabling them when a shutdown occurs across multiple operating systems.

Eaton’s best products that ensure business continuity and operational resilience

There are several other best-in-class products offered by Eaton that can help make IT infrastructures resilient to extreme weather events and other major disruption vectors. These are:

Surge Protectors: The Isobar® line of surge protectors from Tripp Lite by Eaton protect critical IT equipment with surge protection up to 5700 joules and provide robust EMI/RFI protection. They also offer data line protection, USB charging, metal casing, auto shut-off, and other key features.

Rack cooling: Eaton offers packaged air conditioning units that ensure optimal system performance by eliminating hot spots. They can be modernized and reconfigured to handle expansion, upgrades, virtualization/consolidation projects, increased power density, and new hotspots. Businesses can choose from a range of rack-mounted, portable or row-mounted units depending on their cooling needs.

While rack-mounted units work best in server rooms or data centers with one or two racks, as long as the power density stays below 2 kW per rack, portable units are ideal for cooling a small room. servers, up to five racks or one location. Row units are placed in a rack row, making them highly scalable, as organizations can choose to add as many units as they want based on their cooling needs.

UPS: Eaton offers rack-mount, wall-mount and tower-mount UPS units for a variety of use cases and to provide uninterruptible power to ensure that network closets and intermediate distribution frames (IDFs), which are critical components of IT networks, remain operational at all times.

PDUs: Having the right rackmount PDU can be an essential asset for any business to effectively manage their data center. Eaton offers advanced power distribution units in various form factors and for various use cases to ensure business continuity. While metered PDUs provide metering at the branch or outlet level, managed PDUs offer the more advanced features, such as outlet-level switching (i.e. you can switching it off and on remotely) and monitoring at the outlet.

Charging station and charging cart: Eaton offers charging stations or charging carts to allow businesses to operate their laptops/notebooks, Chromebooks and tablets at all times to ensure operational continuity and avoid interruptions caused by unforeseen events. These high-end charging stations can simultaneously power dozens of devices and are also useful from a cybersecurity perspective. Lockable charging stations protect devices while ensuring the security of sensitive and proprietary data stored on devices or accessed by devices when devices are charged or stored.

For more information on Eaton’s disaster response services, click here.