The Mat-Su Valley experienced one of its most disruptive outages of the season this past week when a powerful Bora wind storm knocked down trees and transmission lines across the MatSu Valley. According to PowerOutage.us more than 20K homes and businesses were without power which lasted for days, even despite crews working tirelessly around the clock through this Bora wind event.
A sincere thank you to the emergency responders who worked long hours in difficult conditions to restore service safely.
For local businesses, the outage highlighted a growing reality. Alaska’s weather and infrastructure challenges mean power interruptions are not rare events. The U.S. Department of Energy and a study by Cornell University notes that the United States already experiences more frequent power outages than any other developed nation, and large weather-related outages continue to increase in duration.
Sudden loss of electricity is more than an inconvenience. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports that abrupt power loss can cause data corruption, hardware failures, and longer recovery times if systems cannot shut down correctly.
For small and mid-sized organizations, this can quickly become costly – downtime can cost businesses from hundreds to thousands of dollars per hour depending on the systems affected.
A professionally designed IT environment helps reduce those risks. Key protections include:
- Reliable, tested backups that prevent data loss
- Battery backup systems (UPS) so servers and network equipment shut down safely
- Network monitoring tools that alert support teams immediately
- Redundant internet options for essential cloud access
- A simple recovery plan so staff know what to do when an outage occurs
Alaska’s environment will always pose challenges, but outages do not have to bring business operations to a complete stop. With the right safeguards in place, organizations can protect their data, reduce downtime, and return to work faster after disruptions.
If you want help assessing your continuity readiness or improving your IT resilience, the Alasconnect team is here to support your business. Reach out today!
