OPINION  TCA


MAC


Keith Warburton is the president of


The Technology Channels Association. CONTACT


kwarburton@comptia.org Sunspots!


Keith Warburton , president of the TCA – The UK Channel Community of CompTIA, feels that in the freak occorance of a sunspot the world would not be ready for communications blackout...


I DON’T WANT to start off the New Year as a harbinger of doom, I’d rather you consider what opportunities the future might bring, so here’s something that might get you thinking. Having recently moved home and been without either a domestic phone line or a proper broadband connection for a week, and in addition found that my mobile phone keeps dropping its signal at the most inopportune moments, I am reminded yet again on how dependent the western world is on connectivity. I also wondered what contingency plans anybody has, for instance, in the event of sunspots knocking out our communications. It is forecast that sunspot activity in


2013 will be of such a level that any resultant geomagnetic storm on earth may well knock out electricity grids “for hours, days or even months.” That’s according to the relevant government minister, citing data from NASA – who should know about these things. We all think that if disaster strikes


we’ll manage one way or another, it is human nature to avoid thinking the unthinkable. But just what will happen when the earth’s polarity flips, as science tells us it may do at any time. And of course you don’t need me to tell you about the impact that a high altitude Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (NEMP) would have on electrical and electronic systems.


UK Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox spelled out some of the issues recently, highlighting the threat posed by regimes such as Iran and North Korea who, he felt, might well decide to inflict maximum economic and social damage by detonating their nuclear weapons at high altitude. Dr Fox went on to say that “the range of risks out there is many-fold and I think we need to make that extremely apparent to the public. With reliance, for instance on technology, come vulnerability, and vulnerability can invite attack.” While the risk of deliberate attack is


low and might be politically negotiable, the risk to society of potentially cataclysmic natural events is not. This further underlines the importance of contingency planning and disaster control for our own personal issues and also for our businesses. And once we have mastered these things for ourselves we find that we have a skill that we can bring to our clients’ businesses as well. In short, here’s another area of expertise that you can charge for.


My view is that we are going to see a


lot of public information – mostly warnings – coming out from scientific and governmental bodies over the next year or two, and thus the public will be a lot more receptive to spending money on protecting their personal and business interests, and therein lays a


“We all think that if disaster strikes we’ll all manage in one way or another. But just what will happen when the earth’s polarity flips.”


big opportunity for the ICT channel. Perhaps this is an issue for discussion at the next meeting of the UK Reseller Forum, which is the first branch of the UK Channel Community to go live (Distributor and Vendor Forums are promised for later in the year). Have a look at the CompTIA website to find our more about the community, forums, knowledge base, business solutions and events that are there for you to use. A large portion of the content is freely available to non members as well as those who have decided to formally become part of the largest global trade


Could a Sunspot bring about financial ruin by removing our ability to communicate?


78 PCR January


www.pcr–online.biz


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