Hosting
Comments and opinions about the world of Hosting and IT in general
Wednesday 25 February 2009, 4:02 PM
The Problem with Clouds
Availability and Security, you can’t have too much of either.
Yesterday’s Gmail outage http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39617755,00.htm brought to light the issue that will blight every Cloud Service, what happens if it’s not working. Being in the data centre business for far too long now I used to battle against the ideology of IT Managers for having servers within arms reach, Typically in less than suitable environments. The idea being that if something went wrong they had the ability to fix it.
A fair point. However, the advantages of having an environment specifically designed to ensure that your system stays up and couple that with a managed service where you have teams monitoring and pro-actively managing the platform to ensure it’s available and secure. This has to go hand-in-hand with development teams to ensure that an update to a system won’t bring the system down or in yesterdays case wipe out the whole data centre.
I completely endorse the idea of consuming services rather than investing in an IT infrastructure that needs managing. However, the big question now is, who is providing my service and how secure is my data?
IT Managers who opt down this path must weigh up these considerations as equally as the cost savings they’ll make. What is the impact of a loss of service?
I fear it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services suffers a similar fate. Especially if it’s hosted in those crazy mobile data centers. I like my data centres hosting my data to be completely immobile please.
http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40
So what compensation will those business who suffered yesterday receive?
I went to see a company this week whose e-commerce shop-front was offline for 30 hours causing upto £20k loss of revenue. This is a speciality retailer who can’t afford this unrecoverable loss of income – who can these days? For breaking their SLA’s the hosting company offered standard remuneration of free hosting for every hour lost – why on earth you’d want free hosting after such a horrendous outage baffles me.
But at least he got *something* all those businesses running Gmail yesterday aren’t so lucky only being asked to sign-up for Gmail Labs instead. Asking your customers to upgrade and pay more after you’ve lost their service for half a day may bring in some extra revenue but damages the respectability of Google and a Cloud Computing future.
Yesterday’s Gmail outage http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39617755,00.htm brought to light the issue that will blight every Cloud Service, what happens if it’s not working. Being in the data centre business for far too long now I used to battle against the ideology of IT Managers for having servers within arms reach, Typically in less than suitable environments. The idea being that if something went wrong they had the ability to fix it.
A fair point. However, the advantages of having an environment specifically designed to ensure that your system stays up and couple that with a managed service where you have teams monitoring and pro-actively managing the platform to ensure it’s available and secure. This has to go hand-in-hand with development teams to ensure that an update to a system won’t bring the system down or in yesterdays case wipe out the whole data centre.
I completely endorse the idea of consuming services rather than investing in an IT infrastructure that needs managing. However, the big question now is, who is providing my service and how secure is my data?
IT Managers who opt down this path must weigh up these considerations as equally as the cost savings they’ll make. What is the impact of a loss of service?
I fear it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services suffers a similar fate. Especially if it’s hosted in those crazy mobile data centers. I like my data centres hosting my data to be completely immobile please.
http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40
So what compensation will those business who suffered yesterday receive?
I went to see a company this week whose e-commerce shop-front was offline for 30 hours causing upto £20k loss of revenue. This is a speciality retailer who can’t afford this unrecoverable loss of income – who can these days? For breaking their SLA’s the hosting company offered standard remuneration of free hosting for every hour lost – why on earth you’d want free hosting after such a horrendous outage baffles me.
But at least he got *something* all those businesses running Gmail yesterday aren’t so lucky only being asked to sign-up for Gmail Labs instead. Asking your customers to upgrade and pay more after you’ve lost their service for half a day may bring in some extra revenue but damages the respectability of Google and a Cloud Computing future.
