Power outages are fastest growing operational risk for business

Recent research suggests that power outages were the fastest growing cause of business disruption in 2006.

LONDON - Recent research, conducted by SunGard Availability Services, shows that power-related disruptions increased by more than 350% between 2005 and 2006, and accounted for 26% of customer disaster declarations (invocations), up from 7% in 2005.

Hardware failure, however, remains the leading cause of business disruption, covering almost half (48%) of SunGard’s customer invocations. Flooding and infrastructure-related invocations, such as air-conditioning faults and uninterrupted power supply (UPS) loss, were the third largest cause of business disruption.

“Computers are getting smaller but are much more powerful, and are increasingly drawing on firms’ infrastructure and local electricity suppliers for more and more power,” said Peter Coles, service delivery director at SunGard Availability Services. “As the demand for computing grows, the demand for power grows accordingly, and many companies are finding their existing buildings struggling to cope with this upsurge in power requirements. Listed or older office buildings cannot easily accommodate a ‘retrofit’ to suit current power needs, so careful consideration needs to be given to the limits of the infrastructure when planning for business availability. One option is to consider purpose-built data centre environments, such as those available from SunGard, which are built to deliver the optimum in resilience and uptime.”