Australian Power Failure and Data Backup Emergency Cautionary Tale For the World
Illustrating what can happen on a large scale when power grids fail, and companies do not have adequate backup — or those backups fail — a huge data backup incident occurred on the afternoon of August 22, 2006 in Australia, when a problem with Canberra’s power grid caused a Centrelink mainframe to fail. The Canberra grid supplies electricity to much of the ACT (Australian Capital Territory).
Compounding the problem, backup power to the Bruce, Canberra-based datacenter hosting the mainframe, also failed. The outage caused lengthy delays to Centrelink’s processing of welfare payments, and staff had limited access to affected IT systems.
Although the problem was eventually rectified for Centrelink to make the day’s estimated AU$350 million in payments to more than half a million families, Department of Human Services minister Joe Hockey said he was concerned about the wider implications.
“Needless to say that Jeff Whalan, who’s the head of Centrelink, and myself were firstly not impressed, because we assumed that we had proper power backups,” Hockey said.
“And in fact there was an extensive contract to deliver that power backup. So to say that we were impressed at that moment with the services provided would be a massive overstatement,” Hockey said.
ZDNet Australia has learned Cybertrust was responsible for backup power to the facility, which houses computers for a number of government departments.
This incident is on a much larger scale than “normal” power outage/data loss situations, but one must still be prepared for any level of data backup compromise. That’s why Carbonite is ready, with a 15 Petabyte storage capacity, providing internet and computer users an indispensable service, at a bargain rate of only mere pennies a day. They also offer a 15-day free trial, which will give you a nice introduction to their services.
Once Carbonite data backup is setup on your computer, it requires little ongoing work on behalf of the user. It reads and stores your data as long as you’re on the internet, and users can also log on to the Carbonite site and access their files.
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