Although under pressure to prepare organisations for extended load-shedding or a complete grid failure, few chief information officers (CIOs) and IT leaders could sustain business as usual through extended power outages.
This emerged during a recent high-level round table for CIOs and IT leaders hosted by the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) to discuss managing the risks posed by an unstable grid, according to a report in EngineerIT.
Most said increased power outages had been somewhat or very disruptive for their operations, with only 21% saying the disruption had been minimal.
Only 34% of the CIOs and IT leaders attending said they had the necessary business continuity crisis plan, redundant connectivity and backup power reserves to manage a complete grid failure or outage of a week or longer. 38% were equipped to function through outages only up to six hours, 7% said they could function through outages of up to 24 hours, and 21% said they had no backup power or crisis plan.
Stage 8 load-shedding or grid failure for weeks would be ‘catastrophic’ for many, despite having some form of backing power generation and storage. In addition to basic power concerns, CIOs acknowledged that extended outages would impact connectivity and could cause social unrest, putting staff at risk.
Adrian van Eeden, CIO at GIBS, added: “There are a lot of unanticipated risks. For example, our mitigation strategy was challenged when our generation capacity failed and we couldn’t find spare generators. There are risks around staff and students to consider – if they don’t have connectivity, they can’t participate and there is a risk associated with them travelling to the campus through load-shedding. We have to focus on people – the staff, colleagues and customers.”
While CIOs brace for the possibility of extended outages or grid failure, the current load-shedding cycle is taking its toll – driving up costs and changing IT operations.
One area impacted by load-shedding is cloud migration plans, with some IT leaders speeding up their move to the cloud, and others shelving planned moves to the cloud. 21% said they were moving more workloads to the cloud than planned, and 7% were moving all their systems to the cloud because of load-shedding. 36% were already in the cloud and 25% had not changed their cloud strategy because of load-shedding. 11% said they were not moving to the cloud.
