Building a Disaster Preparedness Strategy? Here’s How Leading Service Providers Can Help

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

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

According to Eaton, North American organizations lose $700 billionOpens a new window annually to downtime, with severe weather-related outages costing the economy between $18 and $33 billion yearly. The average cost per minute of a data center outage has also risen to $8,851, a 38% increase since 2010. Between 2000 and 2017, 19 weather-related grid disruption events also affected more than one million customers.

‘Home-grown’ disaster recovery plans failing to deliver

Organizations must have robust disaster recovery plans and protocols to protect their IT infrastructures from unforeseen and disruptive events. However, it is easier said than done. There are many reasons why organizations fall victim to disasters despite having plans in place. These could be a lack of coordination and communication on the part of IT staff responsible for critical applications, databases, and ERP systems, a lack of clearly-defined roles and responsibilities, not running contingency plans through test environments, and an inability to estimate the cost of downtime or cost of recovery accurately.

According to the IDC White PaperOpens a new window , ‘The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022,’ as many as 93% of organizations suffered a data-related business disruption in twelve months, forcing many to question their existing backup and DR solutions. It also found that inadequate disaster recovery planning resulted in the loss of employee productivity, loss of revenue, and higher recovery costs (see Figure 1 below).

The IDC study, based on a survey of over 500 respondents from medium to large-scale organizations in North America and Western Europe, revealed that in the aftermath of a business disruption event, only 28% of respondents expressed 100% confidence in their backup systems’ ability to recover data, and just 29% had 100% confidence in their DR solution to recover data. As a result, 79% of these organizations activated robust disaster recovery strategies to prevent further disruptions.

Why You Need Reliable and Expert Partners To Build Resilient Disaster Preparedness Strategies

Considering the severe impact of unforeseen events on business continuity, organizations of all sizes and representing different sectors must 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 avoidance application will allow business owners to manage, monitor and proactively determine corrective actions prior to power failure events 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 prepare for unforeseen disaster scenarios optimally:

1. The service provider can identify critical areas of your business that must function at all times. This helps them chart out a contract that covers insurance and training requirements, the requirement of add-on services during times of crisis, and put in place the necessary equipment and manpower proportionate to the task at hand.
2. The first-response service provider can perform a pre-crisis risk mitigation audit to estimate the potential impact of credible disaster scenarios and identify ways of minimizing vulnerability in the event of a disaster.
3. The service provider can also perform a safety audit and based on its findings, establish procedures to ensure injury-free remediation.
4. With expertise in on-time disaster recovery, 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 critical staging of support equipment, including generators, gear and satellite communication networks. It can also help with equipment reclamation, life extension and/or replacement with full manufacturing capabilities regardless of manufacturer.

The good news is that there are reliable and experienced players in the field that have the necessary expertise in estimating the scale of exposure to extreme events and ensuring business continuity.

Eaton’s disaster response servicesOpens a new window , for instance, ensure that businesses have a recovery plan and the necessary support to return to production rapidly and safely. The company’s field technicians are seasoned experts who can help restore backup power systems quickly and safely. Eaton’s expertise in building a proactive and comprehensive disaster response program will help them achieve uptime goals and save operations from financial loss.

The company’s disaster response services provide organizations with a slew of benefits, such as remote monitoring services, preventive maintenance and support services, UPS upgrades (kVA, Energy Saver System, firmware), Eaton replacement batteries, Multi-vendor services (support for other manufacturers’ products), and factory-certified replacement parts.

For example, Eaton’s distributed infrastructure management (DIM) softwareOpens a new window , which forms part of the company’s Brightlayer Data Centers suite, provides the tools needed to monitor and manage power devices in physical or virtual environments. This helps IT managers remotely monitor, manage and control UPS, PDU, servers and other storage devices on the network. It also helps both enterprises and SMBs preserve key assets’ functionality by turning them off when a shutdown occurs across multiple operating systems.

Best products from Eaton 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 leading vectors of disruptions. These are:

Surge protectors: The IsobarOpens a new window ® line of surge protectors from Tripp Lite by Eaton protects essential IT-grade equipment with surge protection of up to 5700 joules and offers robust EMI/RFI protection. They also provide data line protection, USB charging, metal casing, an auto shut-off and other key features.

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

While rack-mounted units work best in server rooms or data centers with one or two racks, as long as the power density remains under 2 kW per rack, portable units are ideal for cooling a small server room, up to five racks or a hot spot. Row-based units are placed in a rack row and this makes them highly scalable as organizations can choose to add as many units as they want based on their cooling requirements.

UPS: Eaton offers rackmount, wall mount, and tower UPSsOpens a new window for various use cases and for ensuring uninterruptible power supply to ensure network closets and intermediate distribution frames (IDF), which are critical parts of IT networks, remain operational at all times.

PDU: Having the right rackmount PDUOpens a new window can be a critical asset for any business to manage its data center effectively. Eaton offers advanced power distribution units in various form factors and for diverse use cases to ensure business continuity. While metered PDUs provide branch-level or outlet-level metering, Managed PDUs provide the most advanced capabilities, such as outlet-level switching (i.e., you can turn it off and on remotely) and outlet-level monitoring.

Charging station and charging cart: Eaton offers charging stations or charging carts to let businesses run their laptop/notebook computers, Chromebooks and tablets at all times to ensure operational continuity and avoid disruptions caused by unforeseen events. These high-end charging stations can power dozens of devices simultaneously and are also helpful from a cybersecurity perspective. Lockable charging stations keep devices safe while ensuring sensitive and proprietary data stored on the devices or accessible by the devices remain secure when the devices are being charged or stored.

For more information about Eaton’s disaster response services, click hereOpens a new window .