Are you seeing a rise in invitations to conferences with this subject matter?  Sometimes they call them Critical Facilities Summit or Conference.  There have been two sophisticated attacks on the power grid in the news of late. (If BING.com is to be trusted?)  Articles about solar flares have been in the news and the effect of Hurricane Sandy and last winter’s storms are spurring a huge increase in home generators as well as generators for small businesses. 

Coal generation is being reduced.  Nuclear is not ramping up fast enough to supply the new demand.  Natural gas is the bright spot but that is taking time to come on line.  But there is a disconnect between power supply and power demand.  Luckilly this is a cool summer so far in the Northeast.

The Data Center Community is paying attention to this as well.  Is this something that records management is dialing into now?

Computer Storage Capacity and Performance have supposedly increased by 40 times according to the Tape Storage Council and Tape Storage is exploding.  Computer Tape is now viewed as the long term retention and E-Discovery model.  The Council still shows 78% of enterprises rely on tape back up. Organizations have now moved to interpreting tapes as equivalent to records.

Home Generator installations are on the rise.  A 50% increase is a significant increase and that is what is being reported by ConEdison and the companies that supply natural gas to run these generators.

Does your department perform a risk analysis on power loss, line surges, and other things that might effect the records management.  Forget the IT Department and the data center, how does the records management department of the current day prepare to access electronic records when the data center is down or it is running but the rest of the organization does not have power?

Should the records management department have its own methodology for accessing records if the data center simply can’t run long term. How would an intermittent data center support affect you?

In my own neighborhood, 70% of the houses have sophisticated back up generators.  In my case, I can go without power for two weeks.  But will Verizon provide Internet?  (They didn’t last power outage.)

Everybody seems to be thinking about this.  Is records management plugged into this?

How about records managers for law firms?  With E-Discovery such a huge thing now, is your firm set with back up power?  Do you have contingency planning?


Hugh Smith
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