Murphy in the Cloud, Losing a lot of Diamonds

The 10 Worst Cloud Outages (and What We Can Learn From Them)

First off my apologies to the Beatles, but after reading this article, sarcasm is duly needed here. It permeates the authors writing style and anyone involved in this field cannot but chuckle as these examples are portrayed in ironic detail.

I learned two new technical terms here as well, Amazon-d and Nutso. They definitely will become part of my lexicon. I found this article a great read, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

However, this just shows "The Cloud" does not excuse us from applying the same basic principles as if we were running these services in house. While there was some mention about fines paid to customers, generally speaking there was no mention about breach of Service Level Agreements (SLA). With in house IT shops we are keen on Business Continuity have these in-place for all internal customers. A key lesson was doing the due-diligence of how these suppliers were handling their own internal processes. If you are going to outsource your IT and wash your hands of the dirty work, better make sure that the people you outsource to are willing to get their hands dirty. Actually, they have to get even dirtier because they are appealing to a much larger customer set. If they fail, it isn't just one shop that goes thud, a lot do, and as noted, it tends to get some really dicey publicity.

So, as the old adage says, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. Unless of course, you make it really the deal you want and really can fly in the clouds and assure your business at the same time.

Ken

How To Solve the Countries Unemployment Problem

Here is a slide from a recent article on the cost of downtime. The post title is a hotlink to the full article. This number may be shocking to some of you, but as time goes on, it isn't going to get any better.

Now, for simple resource budgeting I always used an average of $100k for a fully burdened staff. That number not only included the salary, but benefits, space, computing resource, education, and whatever else happened to come into play.

So, here's an idea, every company could hire one person to attack the downtime problem. That not only would reduce this number, but also generate additional business because that would drag with it investment in hardware and software solutions.

Talk about a win-win solution?

Ken