Fortunately, power outages are fairly rare, often the result of damage caused by a storm or other incident damaging a power cable. When they do occur though, the consequences can cause a lot of problems, highlighted by an incident in June where Amazon’s Australian cloud services became unavailable following a power outage caused by a storm.
In this particular incident their uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) failed, which resulted in the service going offline. Even after the power was returned, the recovery process was also slower than expected, leaving many companies and their customers frustrated.
This had major impact on those consumers and businesses who rely on being able to access the stored data as required, such as an important financial institution. The focus for IT managers and other staff responsible for business continuity plans should be on how to avoid this occurring to their own systems as well reducing the dependency on a third party service for all transactions.
