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Will power cuts impact your future IT decisions?

This week OFGEM warned that the UK faces a potential energy shortage in the middle part of this decade. This got me thinking about the power outage we have experienced in Durham recently.

The outage was a very small “blip” according to National Grid, but enough to test our Business Continuity plans and the ability of our technology to recover. Everything worked and the servers powered down safely. Apart from having to replace the batteries in one of the UPS and one of our engineers missing dinner with friends (which we were incredibly grateful for), the business and our information was protected.

OFGEM are warning that spare capacity is going to be reduced from 15% to less than 2% because old coal and oil plants are being forced to shut down under the European Union’s environmental regulations. New gas powered plants will not be ready until the end of the decade. Because our energy addiction is getting worse, driven by our power hungry technology and consumer demands, there is real concern by OFGEM that during this period power cuts and blackouts will become a reality. Once the spare capacity has returned we will not be out of the woods either as we will have become more dependent on imported gas, an expensive commodity that is only going to increase in price as world energy demands soar. Will these risks to energy supply finally change the way organisations think about business continuity and disaster recovery, and if so, will it herald a new era of the way we deploy and manage technology?

Evangelists of virtualisation and cloud computing have long been making the case for the adoption of these technologies in order to reduce energy and maintenance costs and mitigate against disaster. While these arguments are robust, uptake has remained stubbornly slow, particularly for cloud solutions, and sceptics have persisted - citing security, control and costs as the reasons - to keep the status quo. Furthermore, like for like comparisons of public and private clouds provide little benefit in terms of cost savings. Risk assessments often present outcomes that organisations feel comfortable with – the risk of failure is not great enough to gain the traction needed to move to the cloud.

But what if the risk of energy supply increases, putting complex IT infrastructure into a constant state of flux, powering up and down during outages? Or if energy costs became a bigger part of operational costs? The on-site technology would then be seen as a risk and an expensive overhead by business stakeholders. How many organisations are going to install expensive tier 3 data centres in their buildings just to keep the technology running? If the board of Directors are doing their jobs, they will seek ways to mitigate this risk of failure and improve business continuity. This could be when the case for utility based technology begins to mature.

Of course it would be foolish to pretend there is a silver bullet solution. Individual organisations have individual requirements with varying degrees of risks and costs and moving wholesale to the cloud will probably be inappropriate for most. However, there are considerations that all organisations should be making an allowance for. What does your IT Strategy look like for the next 3-5 years and what technology investments is your business making in this period? Do you have a corporate risk register and does it consider energy? Have you got business continuity plans and have they been tested? Does it rely too heavily on recovering from a disaster rather than continuing through one? If like many, you have split infrastructure over two locations, are they far enough apart to be isolated from localised blackouts? What does your technology energy costs look like? Can you project this forward? Does it stack up economically in 5-10 years’ time? What infrastructure can sit comfortably in the cloud? What infrastructure needs to be on-site?

Most of these questions can be answered through sensible business and technology alignment exercises, but it does depend on an understanding of all of the facts and most importantly current and future risks. In my experience businesses tend to deploy IT reactively, dealing with the here and now. The world is changing and energy supply is part of that change. Businesses and consumers need to prepare sensibly for the future. After all, it’s easier to plan for a disaster than it is to react to one.

Alistair McLeod, Director, Waterstons Limited

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Amy Crimmens .