Some Cloud based issues that we have and are dealing with this week.
Online E-mail Hosting/Sanitation
0800Hrs: Customer: “Dear sir, your money has been sent via e-mail money transfer.”
1330Hrs: Us via phone: “Mr. Client, we still have not received a payment?”
Ah, that’s when we discover that there must be something going on and of course there is the post in the RSS reader that OWN is having issues. The issues continued well past the 1150Hrs EST update time on the above post too.
Online Banking
We can’t seem to do anything with that EMT?!?
- No money honey!
When we called the 800 number the person on the other end said that they knew about the problem and that there was no ETA on a fix.
Conclusion
We really don’t realize just how much impact a service outage can have on us until it actually happens.
As much as we can have the risk evaluation conversation with a client about moving their infrastructure to the Cloud the reality is that they may not become cognizant of the true cost of an outage until it happens.
That missed deposit could create havoc on a business running on the wire! :|
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
Word. Up. One of my Doctor's offices just moved all of their EMRs to a cloud based service. Their provider was down all of last week so everything was done on old paper backups. (The provider was kind enough to email PDFs that they could print over and over again)
ReplyDeleteThis week it is up and slow -- but up. However it isn't running fast enough where they can go get caught up on last week's records.
I didn't have experience with this provider so I couldn't vouch one way or the other. I just gave my general "one point of failure..." blahdy blah blah speech that I always give about cloud services.
Well now this guy is totally soured on the cloud. They were a maybe for Office 365 but now they are a clear cut no.
I think we need some maturity to happen in the cloud. We have seen this before. I'm sure there are plenty of people who remember how god awful Windows NT could be and how insecure Win2k was. People still cringe when you say Exchange because they think of Exchange 5 and 5.5. Well Exchange now powers Hotmail for goodness' sake! Obviously the Windows server OS has matured as has Exchange (and SQL and quite a few other products).
Eventually these providers will realize they can't have failures like this and will start building that into the system.
The lure of a continual revenue stream is just too much to not make these changes!