While summer won’t officially start in the Northern Hemisphere until June 21st, Memorial Day week often marks the “unofficial” start of summer for many and May in general is when many states start to see rising temperatures – especially with the effects of climate changes causing record highs across the country.
For California - and in particular the Central Valley where we’re located - rolling blackouts are a common occurrence as temperatures begin to rise, and these sudden unexpected power outages can damage expensive equipment that’s not properly protected.
Sometimes power companies will give some notice of when an outage will be occurring in your area and in this case, we recommend unplugging what you can as that’s a surefire way to protect your equipment if an unexpected power surge were to occur.
However, blackouts are often random and so we recommend the following preventative measures:
- Surge Protectors – A quality surge protector is a must have for every device on your office network, and not all surge protectors are created equal. Surge protectors always list a joule rating which tells you how much power they can absorb without failing, for computers we recommend a surge protector with a joule rating of at least a 1000.
- UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) – Next on the list is a UPS, this is a battery backup for your devices and for your office server in particular a must have item. When choosing a UPS, you want to ask yourself if you’re looking for something with enough power to let you safely turn your device off or if you wanted something that would keep your device online for days in an extended outage. We also created a short guide found below to what else you should look for when choosing a UPS.
- Power Generators – Finally power generators could be necessary for certain office scenarios, an automatic standby generator will be a big investment but if it’s mission critical your office power stay intact during a rolling blackout it could be worth it.
Also here is our guide on what to look for in a UPS:
We’ve been talking about the power side of rolling blackouts and how an electric surge could potentially damage your devices but there’s also another thing to consider, your data.
If a power outage occurs suddenly, anything that hasn’t been saved could be lost. If you’re a Microsoft 365 customer, you will have the benefit of the short-term backups they provide for your office documents (if you’ve ever had your computer restart while working on something and have experienced the profound relief seeing that “Recovered” documents bar you’ll know what we’re talking about).
If you’re not a Microsoft 365 customer or you’re worried about data corruption or your service backups failing (or maybe your server Isn’t being backed up at all) we suggest talking to us about what your options are.
We offer our clients our triple layer backup solution TechVault. Not only will we back up your onsite data, but we will also create a cloud copy that is updated every 15 minutes and an archival copy that is virtually impenetrable to bad actors.
Want to learn more? Schedule a quick consultation with one of our sales representatives today.
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This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.