Summertime power fluctuations and vacationing staff members can be a bad combination, especially for organizations operating large edge IT environments.
Power loss, not hardware failure, is the leading cause of outages on distributed sites such as retail stores and gas stations, according to Mark Christie, Field CTO at StorMagic. These disruptions are often triggered by weather events, unstable electrical supply, or simple on-site issues like hardware failure.
For companies operating thousands of locations, outages can be routine occurrences. Christie cited one customer with more than 6,000 sites experiencing roughly ten power outages a week.
“It’s less about completely preventing downtime and more about tolerating it and recovering it as well,” Christie explained, emphasizing the importance of resilience and data integrity in edge environments.
A key issue, he noted, is the inconsistent use and maintenance of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. While many organizations deploy battery backups, they don’t always maintain or monitor them properly. In some cases, low-cost UPS units are deployed but never checked, reducing their effectiveness when needed if they even work at all.
“Companies need to take their UPS situation seriously, and many are not,” Christie said, adding that cost pressures often drive decisions in edge environments where margins are thin.
Power failures continue to dominate data center outage causes, accounting for 45% of impactful outages in Uptime Institute’s recently released 2026 Annual Outage Analysis report. While that figure declined from the previous year, it remains significantly higher than any other category.
Within power-related incidents, UPS failures, transfer switch failures, and generator failures are the leading root causes. Uptime analysts said growing grid instability, power constraints, and high-density compute deployments are creating new pressure points for operators already running closer to capacity limits, according to a recent story on the report in Network World.
Beyond power issues, hardware failures—particularly related to storage—also contribute to downtime. He noted that a lack of routine updates, especially to firmware, can make these problems worse, even when the underlying hardware is still functional.
Seasonal staffing gaps can also complicate things. During summer months and end-of-year holidays, when employees are more likely to be on vacation, organizations may lack the personnel needed to respond quickly to outages. Server systems have advanced dramatically in years and can run unattended for a length of time, but not forever, Christie said.
“You can’t replace people entirely,” he said. “There has to be someone on call at some point.”
To mitigate risks, Christie recommends companies invest in better documentation and knowledge-sharing systems, such as internal wikis, to ensure that critical information is accessible when key staff are unavailable.
Ultimately, Christie said, organizations must strike a balance between cost, complexity, and resilience when designing their IT systems. “The edge is not the data center,” he noted. “You’re dealing with environments that are far less controlled, and that changes everything.”
