Most fiber optic cables does not contain metallic components making the cable non-conductive. This gives the cable an advantage towards protection against interference such as EMI, electrical noise, and lightning strikes when compared to copper. A non-conductive fiber cable will not pass an electrical spark through its cable and causing potential damage on the other end. This will protect your equipment from being damage and possibly stopping an outage to occur.
A new customer of ours is currently having issue with their switch constantly being damage from lightning strike. The port that is constantly giving them issue is the port that ties both of their building together. Their current setup is an outdoor rated CAT6 cable that runs underground through conduit to tie both building together. They originally called us for the cable to just be replace but we discover that this is not their first switch to have gone out. We came up with a solution to run a fiber optic cable instead of rerunning a conductive cable.