The True Foundation of our Modern Digital World is … Electrical Power

Should we have ratings of critical infrastructure protection?

As we become more dependent on our critical infrastructure for our modern world, we must make sure it is robust against attack and failure. The core risk is around electrical power supplies. If these are tripped, the whole infrastructure can collapse like dominoes. This is especially relevant as we move to the Cloud, as a power failure in another part of the world can lead to significant problems in other countries.

While many information systems could run for several hours, or perhaps a day or two, a large scale power outage in one part of the world, could bring the whole of your data infrastructure down in an instance, and take days, weeks or even months to recover it.

No power … no data

In 2017, Capita’s systems were knocked out for at least two days, and affected council and NHS infrastructures around the UK (including Sheffield City Council). It related to a power failure in West Malling where generators failed, and shut down the whole of the data centre. Capita is the largest IT provider public sector in the UK, with around a 50% per cent of the overall market (£1.9bn in 2016).