Power shutoffs and outages: how to protect your office IT in Southern California

In Southern California, a power outage is not always caused by a storm or a failed transformer. During high-wind, low-humidity fire weather, Southern California Edison (SCE) and other utilities can switch off power to reduce the risk of their lines starting a wildfire. These Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) can last from a few hours to more than a day, and they tend to come in the fall, right when Santa Ana winds pick up.

For most offices the real damage is not the hours without power. It is what happens to computers, servers and network equipment when the power cuts out without warning, and again when it comes back. A little preparation turns an outage from a crisis into an inconvenience.

What an unplanned shutdown does to your IT

Computers expect to be shut down properly. When the power simply disappears:

• Files that were open or being saved can be corrupted, and unsaved work is lost.
• Servers and NAS devices can be left with damaged file systems or a RAID array that needs a lengthy rebuild, which is exactly when a second weak drive tends to fail.
• Databases and accounting systems may need repairs before they will open again.
• Power often returns with a surge or several quick on-off cycles, which is hard on power supplies, modems and switches.

1. Know when a shutoff is coming

Utilities aim to give advance notice of a planned PSPS when conditions allow, but warnings can be short. Make sure someone at the business is signed up for outage alerts with your utility for the office address, not just their home. If your office is served by a municipal utility such as Burbank Water and Power, Glendale Water and Power or LADWP, check their alert options too. Put the alert contact in your internal phone list so the warning reaches whoever can act on it.

2. Put the right equipment on a UPS

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is a battery unit that keeps equipment running when the power drops. For most small offices, the goal is not to run all day on batteries. It is to ride through short flickers and buy enough time to shut down cleanly.

• Prioritize servers, NAS devices, the firewall, the internet modem or router, network switches and phone system equipment.
• Size it for your actual load and the shutdown time you need, with some headroom. An overloaded UPS can drop everything the moment it switches to battery.
• Replace batteries on schedule. UPS batteries wear out after a few years, and an old battery may only last seconds. Most units have a self-test; use it.

3. Automate a graceful shutdown

A UPS only protects your data if the equipment it powers knows to shut down before the battery runs out. Connect the UPS to your server or NAS by USB or network card and configure the shutdown software, so that after a set time on battery, systems save their work and power off on their own. This matters most for outages that start overnight or on a weekend, when no one is in the office.

4. Plan for the internet going down too

Even with a UPS on your router, your internet provider’s equipment in the neighborhood may lose power during the same shutoff. If your team needs to keep working, consider a cellular backup: a router with a 4G or 5G connection that takes over automatically when the main line fails. If you use cloud phones, make sure calls can be forwarded to mobile phones so customers can still reach you.

5. Make sure your data lives somewhere else

Outages are a good test of your backup plan. A sensible approach keeps at least one copy of important data off-site or in the cloud, so that an extended outage, a failed server or a fire-related evacuation does not cut you off from your files. Cloud services such as Microsoft 365 also let staff keep working from home or another location while the office is dark, as long as accounts and devices are set up for it ahead of time. Most importantly, test a restore occasionally; a backup you have never restored is an assumption, not a plan.

A short checklist before a planned shutoff

1. Ask staff to save their work and shut down their computers at the end of the day.
2. Shut down servers and NAS devices cleanly rather than waiting for the batteries to run out.
3. Confirm last night’s backup completed successfully.
4. Forward main phone lines to mobiles if the office will be closed.
5. Unplug sensitive equipment that is not on a UPS or surge protector.

When the power comes back

Bring things up in order. Start with the internet modem, firewall and network switches, then servers and NAS devices, and finally workstations and printers. Check that shared drives and line-of-business applications open normally, look at the status of any RAID arrays, and confirm that the next scheduled backup runs. Let UPS batteries recharge before relying on them again. If a server will not boot, or a NAS reports a degraded or failed array, stop and get help before trying repeated restarts or rebuilds, which can make data recovery harder.

Getting help

We help organizations across Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire and Ventura County plan for exactly these situations, from business continuity planning and backup and disaster recovery to business connectivity with failover. If an outage has already left a server or drive that will not start, our data recovery team can assess it.