The recent power outage has again reminded us how much we depend on infrastructure over which we have little control.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our Penrose office was in the black out area for most of Sunday.<\/p>\n
Back in olden times, communication equipment was housed in a telephone exchange.\u00a0 During a power outage the exchange would fail over to generators, keeping all of our landlines functioning.\u00a0 Over time a lot of the exchange based equipment has been pushed out to smaller junction boxes that don\u2019t enjoy the same levels of backup power.\u00a0 Those same boxes also house internet equipment.\u00a0 The result being that during the power outage both landlines and internet went down.<\/p>\n
Kinetics Auckland office was inside the blackout area.\u00a0\u00a0 As I drove from Sandringham to the office, my mobile coverage dropped out.\u00a0 I believe that two factors conspired to reduce coverage.\u00a0 The first being that Cellphone towers had to run on batteries, as each tower failed it increased the load on the next.\u00a0 The other factor was with landlines down mobile usage went up, overwhelming the towers.\u00a0\u00a0 During the time I spent in our office, more often than not I could not get a signal.\u00a0 When I did get a signal, the network was congested and I was unable to make a call.<\/p>\n
Phones and Email – without them most business have a major problem.\u00a0\u00a0 Failover sites are one solution, but a solution that comes at a cost and may not suit everyone.\u00a0 The use of failover may also depend on how long an outage is.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a fan of external mail scrubbing, this is when spam and viruses are removed from email before its delivered to your servers.\u00a0\u00a0 If you have KARE mail scrubbing, when your internet goes down your email is queued out there on cloud based servers.\u00a0 All of our KARE mail scrubbing clients were able to use their home internet accounts to access that queued mail during the outage.<\/p>\n
Every business has instructions on how to fail over landlines to mobile.\u00a0\u00a0 Make sure these are printed out and copies are kept off site.\u00a0 Along with the instructions, keep a list of staff mobile numbers.<\/p>\n
At Kinetics we set up a phone tree.\u00a0 On the Sunday Managers contacted Team Leaders who in turn contacted their staff.\u00a0\u00a0 Everyone was advised that if power is still out on Monday, do not drive into the cellphone dead zone.\u00a0 Our plan had engineers heading towards the outskirts of the city. Account Managers would work from home if they had coverage or join the Engineers on the city boundary.\u00a0 Jobs would be funneled to Team Leaders who would then manage their delivery team.\u00a0 A simple and effective structure familiar to anyone that organises school trips or sporting events.<\/p>\n
These are not mid\/long term solutions.\u00a0 But having them in place meant we were ready to respond and we already had in place the means to coordinate the longer term solution if needed.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have KARE Mail scrubbing and would more information, or are interested failover options, talk to your Account Manager, Engineer or email info@kinetics.co.nz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent power outage has again reminded us how much we depend on infrastructure over which we have little control.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our Penrose office was in the black out area for most of Sunday. Back in olden times, communication equipment was housed in a telephone exchange.\u00a0 During a power outage the exchange would fail over to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.kinetics.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}