Although weather has been fairly mild here in the NorthEast, things will be changing rather quickly as the temperatures cool off and ice and snow become a staple of the New England forecast. One of the inevitable truths of a winter in the NorthEast is just *knowing* that you’re bound to lose power due to ice, wind, accidents, or any combination of those events. And when that happens, unfortunately there’s the very real liklihood of losing valuable electronic equipment such as routers, switches, computers, and more due to power spikes and fluctuations.

When we provide equipment to clients as part of their services, be it for DSL, T1, fiber, wireless, or managed firewall, one of our requirements is that the equipment be plugged into a UPS (uniterruptible power supply) to protect it from those power spikes and fluctuations that can occur when there’s power loss. It’s also highly recommended that any other sensitive devices be plugged into a UPS as well to safeguard them.

If your power goes out, if you don’t have a backup generator, odds are you’re not going to be doing very much online or with your computers! So why does it matter if they’re plugged into a UPS or not? It matters because devices like routers and switches can be protected against power spikes when the electricity comes back on, or even worse, flickers – which can cause some majorly unhappy devices.

Computers and servers are even more susceptible to power loss, and having them on a UPS will allow you to gently power them down, and also power them back up once electricity is restored. Horror stories are abound about computers that don’t recover from a power loss, failing to reboot due to hard drive errors. Having that happen to a business server that contains all of your backups and data could be catastrophic.