You had referred to just the power being off, and mentioned an actual power outtage of three hours. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a targeted EMP strike, though the effects have occurred in thunderstorms etc
My team has experienced an equipment loss due to a similar natural incident, and thus a loss of a capability / feature of the team, a loss of an occasional income stream and a significant financial loss to the member who built that equipment **
Even targeted EMPs would not be as Hollywood predicts, but would be at varying levels
All of the tech people are unilaterally incapable of explaining what happens when the power goes off.
I don't mean apocalyptically, just off.
We had a power outage at work that knocked the internet off for about four hours, and the whole business ground to a halt. No printers, no documents saving or opening, no AI.
If we go for planning for an EMP, then we’ll go back to a risk assessment - not to forget the likelihood and therefore the cost/benefit of mitigations
Firstly a directed EMP and/or power grid surge don’t just affect electronics. There is the risk of electrocution and fire. So a risk to life of the staff. That’s not an IT departments risk but the whole business risk
The battery element itself isn’t affected by an EMP, but the electronic control/safety systems in laptop batteries is
If a credible risk to the business then an IT department can do pretty much nothing to protect anything in use - they can propose spare laptops and batteries to be stored in faraday cages. This is not just the cost of additional equipment but it needs to be maintained with updates, or will add to delay in getting back up & running.
You would also need assurance that your access to a remote server etc is protected, and may need to therefore run your own server that is EMP protected, generators, surge protection etc
Your business could save the IT department a headache by getting the infrastructure department to mitigate the risk by placing the business in a deep underground bunker or under a mountain. Those will be pricey though and staff might not be keen in working in those environments, adding to HR costs and potential health & sickness issues of working in other environments
** Real life scenario:
I’m one of the founder members of a paintball team, we have run our own events, run parts of other people’s events and we have a technology genius.
One of their builds, covering a at least £1500 in parts, was an automated sentry gun, (on topic it includes AI target identification - we still have its AI data)
We used this at our events as an objective to bypass/defeat and either rented it to other events or got free entry to other events, It is also ‘as seen on TV’ when we provided it for a movie myth TV show
We often left it stored at the site we were associated with, which is less than 5 miles from my office
One day we heard what sounded like an explosion - a bit worrying as I work for the MoD, but it turned out to be a lighting strike …. About 5 miles away
Lightning hit the power at the substation beside the site, surged through the underground cable and blew the power input to the site office & store, resulting in a fire.
Our sentry gun was in the store
The site as a business survived, it was a former mushroom farm and it already had plans to expand a function/party building which was revised to new office etc, and with the insurance was able to reinvest in new equipment. Fire damaged mushroom tunnels were made safe, partially restored and the remaining damage became ‘game features’
Our sentry gun was not directly covered, but would have been paid for if we had bought it, as it had been built a fraction of the costs were recovered.
The sites business risk assessment worked with insurance that covered restoring most of the business but were lucky enough on their financial backing to be able to ride the storm until resolved, combined with the nature of the activity being able to continue.
A less dramatic example is my friends sons office was closed following a fire in a different business on the ground floor. He arrived one morning to barrier tape forbidding entry until the building was declared safe.
This was post Covid, so they had hybrid working, and cloud servers. Those with their laptops were just sent home, those who’s laptops were upstairs just had to wait for IT to buy some and configure them