Maintain Continuity in a Power Outage

Avoid chaos when the lights go out.

Analyst Perspective

Nearly every organization must contend with occasional power outages, but for many it is almost certain that it will happen regularly.

We generally discuss disaster response planning (DRP) and business continuity planning (BCP) as comprehensive plans that cover all technology domains and business processes. However, it is advisable to narrow the scope to a single incident or event if there is a materially higher risk of it happening. There is a significant risk of rolling blackouts around the world due to potential natural gas shortages and weather events such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires, as well as crumbling power grids in some developing countries.

Our guidance is to prepare for power outages as if they were a near certainty. We have all the tools and resources to help members prepare in our DRP and BCP research, but that can seem daunting. If you don't have a documented DRP or BCP or if they are dated and untested, take this opportunity to laser focus on a single event - a loss of electricity. Understand the business impact and risk, conduct comprehensive and honest tabletop planning, develop recovery workflows, and test your capability to maintain business continuity during a power outage.

The tools, resources, processes, and practices in this research are scalable to any business of any size in any industry. However, understand that maturity, complexity, and business processes will impact time and effort to prepare, so plan accordingly.

Mark Tauschek
VP, Distinguished Analyst & Research Fellow
Info-Tech Research Group

Insight summary

Power outages are inevitable

Disruptions will happen to every power grid in the world. The likelihood and duration of outages vary widely but realize that if your business relies on any utility power grid, you will experience outages. Sometimes there will be notice in the case of planned, rolling blackouts, but more often power disruptions are unplanned and unexpected.

Assess risk and cost to the business

When preparing a comprehensive DRP or BCP, essential evaluations must be completed. This is true when planning for a single incident or event as well. The most critical assessment tool used to identify risk and potential cost is a business impact analysis (BIA). Be thorough and detailed when completing a BIA for a power outage scenario. Evaluating processes and dependencies, potential costs, impact, restoration objectives, and current gaps is an essential activity that must be completed thoughtfully and comprehensively.

Plan and test scenarios and recovery

Tabletop planning is essential to run through the scenario and identify capabilities and gaps. The time required for the tabletop planning exercise is well spent - it will help you understand your ability to respond and document where gaps exist. Use the experience in your actual scenario tests. Real-world testing should happen at least semiannually for the power outage scenario and recovery workflows should be tested as thoroughly and as realistically as possible.

Executive summary

Your Challenge

You have critical infrastructure and systems in a location that is prone to power outages. You must maintain service continuity and critical systems, whether it is an unexpected event or planned rolling blackouts.

• If you have a DRP and BCP, they may be large and complex, making it difficult to identify specific risks, dependencies, incident-specific plans, and recovery workflows.
• The DRP and BCP may not be regularly updated, and specific scenarios are not tested.
• You and your team are not prepared, and chaos ensues when there is a power outage.

Common Obstacles

• Time: It seems impossible to make the time to properly prepare for these incidents when the resources required are busy with their daily work.
• Effort: Just like the time constraint, the effort and resources required to thoughtfully prepare BIAs with risks and dependencies and conduct comprehensive tabletop planning may feel like it doesn't pay dividends.
• Investment: There are implicit and explicit costs associated with planning and testing. Testing should occur after hours in a maintenance window and should happen two to four times per year. Overtime pay alone is a quantifiable cost.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Every organization should have comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans, but those in areas prone to power outages should extract the power outage scenario from the comprehensive DRP and BCP.
• Organizations must spend time on scenario-specific business impact analysis, tabletop planning, recovery workflows, and actual testing to ensure there are no gaps in plans.
• It is much more practical to focus on this single likely scenario than to revisit and test against the full DRP or BCP semiannually.

Info-Tech Insight

Don't get overwhelmed by trying to boil the ocean with comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans when there is a materially higher risk of a specific incident – a power outage. Focus on honing the organization's ability to respond to, and maintain continuity during, a power outage.

There is no silver bullet

Focus on the fundamentals.