Power outages present a real and growing threat to business continuity: Chloride

Chloride, one of Europe’s leading suppliers of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and services, is strongly advising UK businesses to deploy resilient UPS systems in order to protect their mission critical equipment and processes. Chloride has taken this initiative following worrying reports from CapGemini, which have confirmed the growing fears of the business community regarding power availability, stating that electricity output has fallen by 2.2 percent, the lowest level in 10 years.

Power cuts are a real and increasingly likely threat to business continuity throughout the UK, due to an ageing energy generation infrastructure and reduced capacity to meet energy demand. During 2007-2008, the National Grid reported over 600 events where transmission circuits were disconnected automatically, or by urgent manual switching.

Chloride carried out an analysis of its 2,300 UPS systems currently connected to its unique LIFE.net monitoring system and found that, during an average month, the system recorded more than 450,000 voltage spikes, dips, irregularities and breaks in the electricity supply, all of which can be harmful to mission critical equipment and processes. Additionally, Chloride found that power failures occurred every 832 hours and alarmingly, brownouts occurred every three hours.

“By analysing the information from our LIFE.net system, we found that each of the 2,300 UPS systems monitored in the UK protect organisations from disturbances 200 times a month, or seven times per day,” confirms Chloride’s technical support manager, Rob Tanzer. “Last year the National Grid reported 49 single events of power loss to customer premises. While this highlights the potential risk to business continuity, it must be remembered that brownouts, spikes and surges can all harm sensitive electronic equipment.”

•Date:2nd April 2009• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Power management
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