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10) Does your organisation protect sensitive equipment from power failures?

August 30, 2022
Physical Security
Environmental Risk
Power Failure

Answer yes if your organisation uses controls (such as Uninterruptible Power Supplies, UPS) to protect sensitive equipment from power failures.

The most common control used to protect sensitive equipment is UPS, or an uninterruptible power supply. UPS is essentially a set of batteries that allow your sensitive equipment to draw power to shut down safely and to avoid data loss. Most UPS devices will also protect your equipment against power spikes as well.

A further control (typically employed by data centres) will be onsite backup power generators that can take over power production once the UPS has kicked in. The UPS is still required as the generators will take time to start and so the UPS kicks in immediately upon a power outage and provides power until the generators can be started.

A uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will safeguard data, software, and hardware and can help to avoid the disruption and cost of an uncontrolled system shut down. A UPS will enable your company to have full control during a power supply incident and to decide whether to continue operations or invoke a controlled system shutdown for the duration of the incident.

How to implement the control

A UPS is typically only needed to protect desktop computers or self-hosted servers (if you are using a cloud environment their data centres should have power redundancy). Laptops are already protected as they contain a battery.

If your company requires UPS contact a UPS vendor who will be able to support you in defining the specification of UPS needed and implementing it correctly within your premises.

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