Small, medium and micro enterprises (SMME) that fail to effectively plan for unscheduled and unpredictable power outages could experience significant short and long-term financial losses as a result of a loss of network connectivity and data.
This is according to Abid Qadiri, Chief of Business Solutions and Excellence at Neotel, who says that recovering from the effects of these power outages can take months, in some cases shaving away as much as 20% of an
SMME’s top-line revenue. “The loss of power at a business can be more crippling than the worst strike.”
He says that a power cut can instantly take away a small businesses’ ability to function should the servers at its head office be interrupted.
“For companies with multiple offices, this could result in a much wider geography of the business being affected. Similarly, a power outage can affect communication between a small business and its customers, leading to a short and long-term loss of revenue.”
He explains that an SMME may suffer a tarnished reputation in the market, should it fail to provide reliable services to its clients. Furthermore, customers will be less likely to consider it for business in the future. This is likely to
occur in cases where websites, online portals, email servers and call centres go offline due to the power outage.
Qadiri says that a sudden loss of power or degradation of quality of the power supply will also severely affect a business’s IT systems.
“One of the easiest and most cost effective ways that an organisation can limit the impact of power cuts is to host its servers and network infrastructures in a reputable, secure and reliable data centre which has the necessary
resilience built into its power supply systems.”
“This enables all servers inside the data centre to operate at full capacity in the case of power cuts. “With an uninterrupted supply of power to its servers and networks, the business can service its customers at multiple branches,
even if its head office experiences power interruptions,” adds Qadiri.
He explains that by hosting customer contact points, like email servers, call centre switches, company websites and self-service portals in a highly resilient data centre, a company can also still maintain interaction with its
customers during massive power disruptions.
He says large financial institutions have implemented distributed data centre infrastructures, resilient networks and well-rehearsed disaster recovery scenario plans to effectively deal with power outages. “Due to the nature of these
businesses a significant amount of capital has been invested on the duplication of server and network infrastructure at various data centres.
“While small businesses do not have the financial muscle to duplicate IT infrastructure across data centres, they can still successfully use the power of virtual servers and private cloud architectures to create fully functional disaster
recovery systems, hosted at a data centre. With tight integration into their networks, these businesses can have the same speed of recovery as their larger counterparts at a fraction of the cost,” he concludes.
