Power supply failures were the fastest growing source of business disruption last year according to a survey by Sungard the business continuity supplier.

The report claims that the growing use of blade servers by IT departments combined with greater demand on IT and air conditioning systems has resulted in an increase in power related disruptions of more than 350% over the past 12 months, and now accounts for over a quarter (26%) of customer disaster declarations.

The survey also confirmed that hardware failure still remains the leading cause of business disruption, covering nearly half (48%) of SunGard’s customer invocations, with flooding and infrastructure-related invocations such as air conditioning faults and uninterrupted power supply (UPS) loss being the third largest cause of business disruption, representing 5% of invocations each.