Energy crisis: how can you manage the risk of outages in your data centers?

A sudden power cut can have serious consequences for our datacenters, especially those of intermediate size.
How can we prepare for this situation?
What sources of information should we use (to govern is to foresee)?
Vincent Balouet, director of MaitrisedesCrises.com, answers our questions.

Infortive, a network of transitional CIOs, and MaitrisedesCrises.com, run by Vincent Balouet, a former Cigref project manager who was called in urgently to prepare the CIOs of France's biggest companies for the Y2K rollover, have signed a strategic agreement designed to ensure that Infortive's CIOs have access to the best analyses and recommendations to help them anticipate major crises.

Can you explain the current energy context?

In France, we've had electricity problems for over a year and a half now, with our nuclear power plants not doing very well and our hydroelectric plants at zero following this summer's heatwave. We'll be able to get gas for next winter, but nothing is certain for the following one.

Wind power and photovoltaics are intermittent resources, particularly in the event of extreme cold.

The situation is therefore tense. This summer's heatwave has awakened people's spirits and raised the question of how to get through the winter.

The public authorities plan to control consumption by :

• First of all, private individuals will be able to use Ecowatt. It will help the French to better organize their energy consumption by tracking their consumption and offering advice. The app will also be in the pocket of all employees, who will also be given instructions on how to limit their consumption.
• The second stage will be to build on the reduction in consumption by the companies that consume the most electricity.
• The next stage will involve all administrative departments. Efforts will be required on public lighting, heating, elevators, escalators...
• The final level is load shedding. And it's to be expected that load shedding will cause disruption to the network, which is rarely trouble-free, especially when it comes to IT.

So, naturally, the energy crisis is a problem for EDF, but as CIOs, we need to think about how well our datacenters and IT assets are functioning. While very large datacenters may not be offloaded, the same cannot be said for smaller ones.

We're going to be dependent on the weather, and if we experience temperatures well below normal, we'll have to face a crisis.

What does this mean for information systems, and for us as CIOs?

Shutting down a data center takes several hours. You need to keep enough downtime in the generator tank to be able to shut down your datacenter properly when there are no other solutions.

If you don't plan ahead, databases will be open, files won't be synchronized, and it will take hours or weeks to get everything back in place.

The challenge for CIOs is to fully understand this situation and :

• An intelligence strategy
• A strategy for reducing consumption (non-priority activities: studies, recipes, etc.).
• A strategy of vigilance from the first load shedding in France
• A strategy of absolute vigilance during blackouts
• And a strategy for making quick decisions when, after several load shedding operations, you have no choice but to cut everything off.

All this presupposes that you can contact General Management to warn them of the outage, otherwise it's a major incident that will last for months.

It's your role as CIO to scrutinize the meters, the gauges, to fully understand the situation. It's absolutely essential to understand the behavior of the Information Systems for which you're responsible, whether it's just a minor inconvenience or an outright blackout.

Of course, all this has to be prepared, so you need to put on the table: consumption, the stopwatch, how much is in the generator tank, etc., and check that you are able to warn all the company's players at any time of the day or night to announce an outright shutdown of the entire information system.

Downstream, we also need to ensure continuity of work: if it's cold, it's likely that company employees will prefer to stay at home. And if telecommuting facilities and VPN infrastructures are not sufficiently backed up, it won't work. So it's vital to enable information systems to function properly in an unusual configuration.

The other parameter to consider is suppliers. We have to make sure that the company's critical suppliers know how to react. If one of our major suppliers doesn't anticipate and is blocked, it could bring the company to a complete halt.

It's up to CIOs to question suppliers. You need to ask yourself what's going to happen with your cloud hosts, all external service providers, web services, etc... You need to make sure they've made the same effort to anticipate and prepare as you have.

In conclusion, we have one or two months to understand and revise our procedures, to be ready to act and to anticipate the eventuality of things going wrong. This work is essential to ensure the smooth running of our businesses.

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Would you like to find out more?

Website: www.maitrisedescrises.com

Vincent Balouet - Managing Director MaitrisedesCrises.com
A former consultant, then project manager for Cigref, the French insurance federation and MEDEF, Vincent Balouet was successively called upon by the latter from 1992 to 1999, then assigned to Bercy to ensure the success of the sector's national mobilization for the Year 2000 computer changeover. He is involved in a number of major systemic risks to the economy in France and abroad, and created Maitrisedescrises.com, an analysis and recommendations service available by unlimited subscription.