Preparing For Another New England Nor’Easter & Other Extreme Weather

Extreme weather hits nearly every location around the world, whether it’s snow, rain, droughts, heat waves, and more. Here in New England, where AVTECH is headquartered, we’re about to get hit with our third nor’easter in less than two weeks.

Nor’easters bring heavy precipitation and winds when they arrive; this one will be bringing up to 18” of snow to our region. The last two storms brought heavy rain and wind, weather strong enough to cause flooding and power outages across multiple states. These conditions usually mean travel bans, and employees aren’t able to be onsite to check on your facilities to make sure they have power, or water hasn’t entered the building through a leaking roof or a burst pipe due to frigid temperatures. Additionally, at a time when so many of your employees are depending on remote access to stay productive, unexpected downtime could make remote access impossible.

When storms like this occur, it’s important to have environment monitoring already in place to help protect your data center, server room, storage areas, and facilities. Receiving alerts that power has been lost, or water has been detected, will help you protect your assets and get your organization back to full speed as quickly as possible, rather than spending valuable time assessing damage and recovery when the storm is over.

What are the key areas your organization should be monitoring for continued protection during extreme weather and storms?

Power

Power loss can be devastating to organizations that rely heavily on IT infrastructure, freezers, and more to operate. Abrupt power outages or spikes can result in server crashes and lost data, or losses for items such as food or medicine that must be kept in cold storage.

Many organizations in areas that are susceptible to extreme weather have already planned for power outages by installing backup generators and/or UPS units to supply power to their mission-critical devices, even if it’s a short window just to gracefully power down. In a situation where power may be lost for days instead of just a few minutes, knowing when power was lost can help you to better estimate what stock may be lost or damaged, or when your generator will need to be refueled or serviced. It can also help you better prepare for the next storm by ensuring you have enough backup power ready to serve your facilities.

Flood

Water leaking into your data center, or file storage area, could be catastrophic for your organization. Insurance may cover remediation and cleanup costs, but lost data and customer history costs could be astronomic, along with revenue losses due to the time your office must close for repairs.

Monitoring for flood conditions at critical points in your facility will help alert you when water is detected as soon as it happens. Many times your organization may be closed, or short staffed due to travel conditions, and you simply won’t have enough eyes on the areas of your facility that are susceptible to water leaks.

It goes without saying that water leak hazards don’t just occur in extreme weather like a nor’easter. Construction accidents near your facility, a leaking pipe, or even something as small as an unnoticed foundation crack can all cause thousands of dollars in damages year-round. Installing flood monitoring will help alert you to water leaks regardless of the season… however it’s even more critically important during extreme storms.

Temperature & Humidity

Extreme cold snaps during winter storms, coupled with heating loss due to power outages, can quickly lead to disastrous conditions for your facility. Burst pipes are a major concern; flood monitoring will tell you if a frozen pipe has burst and caused a leak in your facility, however it’s far more preferable to be alerted to low temperatures so you can remedy the situation long before it leads to burst pipes.

High heat is a cause for concern, even in the winter. If a power outage caused by a storm brings down your facility’s HVAC, servers that are running on generators or UPS power are still generating heat. Without air conditioning to cool the room, temperatures can quickly rise to the level that causes hard drive failure.

Air conditioning also helps to keep the air dry and humidity regulated. If HVAC stops working, the air runs the risk of becoming too humid, leading to condensation and premature failure of sensitive equipment. Even in the middle of winter, high heat and humidity could bring down your data center or server room just as quickly as HVAC loss during the summer. Being alerted as soon as temperatures or humidity exceed (or drop below) thresholds you determine can be the difference maker during extreme weather.

Protect Your Facility

Hopefully your organization put proactive environment monitoring in place long before extreme inclement weather strikes your area. It’s important to set this up with enough time to generate your own custom alerts, create notification teams, install your sensors in the most appropriate places for your facility, etc.

If your facility is located in a region that gets hit with extreme storms, it makes sense to monitor your environment proactively to help prevent downtime and data loss. Nearly 30% of all outages and data loss incidents are caused by environment factors, and that statistic is steadily increasing along with the rate of extreme weather episodes.

Don’t wait to protect your critical facilities, data, and assets. Install proactive environment monitoring before the next big storm hits, and your whole staff will have peace of mind knowing that your organization is protected against costly prolonged downtime.