I usually focus on Key Performance Indicators and leading indicators for healthy business growth, but recently I have been working with clients that have experienced outages with their supposed 24x7x365 cloud solutions. I wanted to share lessons learned with you, and help you ensure you are truly a bullet proof infrastructure in the cloud.
Most people assume “Cloud” means never experiencing an outage or almost never experiencing an outage. While this may be the expectation, we have been working with our clients to optimize the entire infrastructure chain as we all know all chains are only as strong as the weakest link.
One of our clients used a “Cloud” email service provider, and authenticated this email service through a series of active directory and active directory federation services servers (AD and ADFS). This is a widely accepted and deployed configuration so you may very well be using the same or similar environment.
What happened during a power outage at our client site? The cloud email service was still running, but the AD and ADFS servers could not authenticate the sessions since the servers were without power, so the end result was the user experienced a complete loss of email service even though the email service was up and running in the “Cloud”.
This should be a wakeup call for every CIO, VP Infrastructure, IT Director who owns services in the Cloud. It’s very dangerous to assume Cloud = 24x7x365 Access. As our example just exposed any link in the chain can cause an outage and perceived lack of service of your team.
What to do?
Call us and we will help you evaluate your entire chain of access and make sure it is secure and indeed 24x7x365. We will also share our best ideas with you regardless of private, public, or hybrid cloud. That is what we do at BizTech managed cloud services 24x7x365. We are glad to help you. Contact me at anytime for additional Cloud information ltsao@biztech.com.
