Power Surges can be caused by many things, but they can have quite an effect on your computer hardware. The surges in current can damage your hardware and cause loss of data. The best defense against this threat is to have a surge protector plugged into the wall and this allows you to plug your computer into the surge protector. This gives the best protection against the issues that plague unprotected systems. A Power Conditioner can protect against the surges that can damage your hardware. But this is an expensive proposition and would not be justified unless the company could afford such a device. A power conditioner may be installed as the top device in a rack mount and then protect up to 10 devices.
Brownouts can be another cause of data loss in a company. The momentary loss of power can cause great damage to a computer system; the power loss; even though it may be momentary; data loss could occur on sensitive computer systems. Again; there exists a technology that can protect against this threat. A UPS can supply uninterrupted power to your computer system and prevent any data loss. A power conditioner is a device that can filter and condition the power supplied to the equipment and makes sure that the power is as smooth as possible; smoothing out all spikes and brownouts to make sure that the power is as reliable as possible. This is very important when using mission-critical server applications.
Blackouts are the total loss of power. This is an obvious danger as you could lose data when the power is lost. The solution to this is to deploy an Uninterruptible Power supply that can power your system while it is without power. A moderately-priced UPS can power your system for 15 minutes, this gives enough power to save your work and backup critical files before you lose power. A UPS that is more expensive can power your system for up to 3 hours, this is very expensive though. An Eaton 5E 2000VA/1200 Watt UPS may be had for a reasonable price and will provide good protection against loss of data from a blackout. If you are using a Ubuntu operating system, it will detect a UPS and then allow power management accordingly. This also allows graceful shutdown of the PC when power is lost, this prevents data loss. In the Ubuntu power properties, it can also display the battery status of the UPS whilst you are using your PC.