If it feels like you hear about a new natural disaster every time you open your phone or turn on the news, there’s a good reason for that: the country has been dealing with an uptick in all manner of natural disasters—from wildfires to hurricanes to floods to tornadoes to earthquakes.
If you’re a business that can’t go down, you know just how disruptive and destructive a natural disaster can be. That’s why natural disaster preparedness and business continuity planning are more important than ever.
For businesses that can’t afford to lose critical power, it’s crucial to ensure that your operations can stay up no matter what nature throws your way. Planning and forethought can go a long way in ensuring that your critical power systems don’t fail when you need them most.
Here are 7 things you can do to protect your power infrastructure and ensure you have electricity when it matters most:
Being prepared for any kind of disaster starts with the design of the system itself. When it comes to protecting your emergency power systems and ensuring you never go down, your system design is a crucial and often underestimated element. Companies that have thrived in the face of adversity often credit their success to flexible, safe, and resilient infrastructure, including backup power solutions and robust supply chains.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of prioritizing ongoing, preventative maintenance. Staying on top of maintenance is probably the most important tool you have available to protect your critical power systems.
Effective maintenance includes:
If you’re performing the kind of ongoing preventive maintenance that you should be, that should mean you’re utilizing benchmarking. During scheduled maintenance tests and inspections, record and track the actual results of each test—not just pass/fail. This data becomes invaluable when predicting, preventing, or quickly repairing problems in your power system.
When you test, look at the entire system—not just individual components. Testing a single component provides some information, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture. End-to-end power testing ensures that all components are working properly together as a complete system, which is essential for power outage prevention.
Make sure that you are documenting everything. This includes benchmarking data, as well as comprehensive contingency and resiliency plans. If you already have plans in place, now is the time to revisit and update them. Your plans should cover not only the disasters you expect but also those that are unlikely or unexpected.
Remote monitoring services provide a number of benefits. They can keep systems running even if staff need to evacuate and allow for remote assessment of damage, giving you a head start on preparing a response plan. These services are a key part of modern disaster recovery for businesses.
Don’t wait until a disaster strikes to ensure that every vendor you work with meets your expectations of quality and is familiar with all local codes and requirements. Choosing a partner without the necessary experience or expertise is always a gamble. It’s wiser—and more cost-effective in the long run—to invest in quality critical power supplier relationships now.
There are steps you can take right now to make sure that you’re prepared for the next natural disaster. If your company can’t afford downtime, ensure you have a strong critical power system in place before anything goes wrong.