Sun, Sea, and Surges: Empowering Businesses Against Malta’s Power Cuts

As the island of Malta continues to bask in its own popularity, a surge in population growth and sizzling global temperatures have set the stage for an electrifying challenge – frequent power cuts ranging from few minutes to several days. This energetic dance between inadequate infrastructure and growing demands has left businesses in the dark for the last weeks, and although the situation is now “under control”, these power outages are far from over [1], [2], [3]. Fear not, for amidst the flickering lights, a symphony of solutions emerges, promising a brighter and more resilient future for Malta’s enterprises. Join us on this journey as we explore the power play, uncover potential pitfalls, and offer ingenious solutions that will illuminate the path forward.

Unraveling the Power Play: Behind the Scenes

1. Inadequate Infrastructure and Population Surge: As Malta’s shores welcome more souls seeking sun and adventure, the surge in population strains the energy grid’s muscles. In a theatrical twist, the sweltering summers fuel a soaring demand for air conditioning, resulting in over heating of underground cables and sub-stations power cuts that has caused increasing business losses (early estimates point to over 200 mill. €) and cast shadows over the island’s vitality.
2. Global Warming and AC Frenzy: Climate change adds an unpredictable twist to the plot. Rising global temperatures fuel an AC frenzy, creating a power demand tug-of-war that leaves businesses and homes in suspense.

Navigating Power Cuts with Local Infrastructure: The Business Quandary

With the situation bound to repeat, how can businesses with all local infrattructure protect themselves against these power cuts? Of course, this being an Information Technology blog, our focus will be into these systems continuity. For other industrial or more customer based solutions, our readers will have to find different sources and solutions.

Let’s list some of the problems that power disruption can cause to our Technology Systems:

1. Dwindling Service Availability: Local servers feel the heat of power cuts, leaving digital services at a standstill. The crescendo of frustration among customers can be a deafening sound. This is specially true for those businesses that offer public services from their own premises like ordering and booking or just general access to their web or mail for employees.
2. Data Corruption Ballet: Mid-performance power cuts can lead to a tragic data corruption dance. Critical business information can waltz into the abyss, leaving behind digital chaos. Abrupt data transfers or disrupted processes in databases tend to require many hours of work to repair, if at ever they can be.
3. Employee Productivity Tango: Unplanned intermissions due to power cuts lead to a lackluster productivity tango. Employees find themselves stranded, the dance floor devoid of rhythm. Sending your employees home with “forced” leave will still create a sink in productivity and a damaged profit due to salaries.
4. Expenditure Limbo: Financial transactions and payroll processes caught in the crossfire lead to wasteful expenditures, adding a comic twist to the power play. Let’s hope non of the high volumne financial transactions between servers got caught in a power outage, they will be forever wandering in the limbo and the local banks are well known for their “blazing speed” response to any kind of issue.
5. Backup Drama: Power cuts wreak havoc on backup schedules, endangering data recovery strategies, and potentially turning businesses into a tragicomic tableau. This happens precisely when these backups are more important, at the edge of having your data at risk, the last thing a business wants is to know the last “usable” backup was weeks ago.

Shining Light on Business Resilience

With these problems in mind, let’s construct resilient solutions to support our businesses and avoid the future power outages while the government and the brave support men and women on Enemalta work tirelessly in the infrastructure refurbishment.

Cloud Infrastructure – Rise Above: Step into the cloud’s embrace, bid adieu to local servers, and usher in scalability and redundancy. Power cuts become mere background noise in your success story. This specially relevant for small businesses with a small number of servers. The cloud costs will be far smaller than keeping the on-prem infrastructure updated and resilient enough. Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure offer the perfect space to keep all your data and processes without breaking the bank.

Remote Work Renaissance: Power cuts? No problem! Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) transforms adversity into advantage, allowing work to flourish regardless of location. Many companies can easily imporve not only their fleet management, but also their security and resiliency by implementing full remote desktop solutions like Windows 365

Cloud Backups – Safeguarding Brilliance: Embrace cloud-based backups, where data resides in the digital firmament, immune to the earthly antics of power cuts. With the price of Cloud storage in near free fall and the network ingress being free in both Azure and AWS, there is no excuse to keep any long term backups on-prem. Modern backup software solutions like Acronis, Veeam or Altaro will take care to optimise the data delivery to cater for even the most exigent businesses, unless we are discussing about several Terabytes of data per day of change, this is most likely the best and cheapest option to have secure and tested backups.

Co-Location Services – Unite and Conquer: Co-locate your infrastructure in secure data centers, where power hiccups are subdued, and business operations continue undeterred. For those companies that have a very specific hardware infrastructure or governance requirements that prevent them from moving to the Cloud, a local Co-Location might be the best option.

UPS Resilience – Power Play Continuity: Equip your operations with Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) infrastructure, ensuring a seamless transition during power cut acts. Investment in UPS and local generators to keep infrastructure running for short periods of time could be a good alternative, but these options will only work for short bursts and are not designed to replace the main power.

Conclusion

In the midst of Malta’s power conundrum, businesses can emerge stronger and more resilient. The path forward is illuminated by innovative solutions that transcend power cuts, empowering businesses to thrive amidst adversity. As we stand on the threshold of a future where power plays are met with steadfast responses, remember that Opteia is your partner, ready to light up your journey with expertise and support. The show will go on, and your business can shine even brighter on this dynamic stage.