[Authors note: Today's date is October 12, 2009, the 8th day after the outage, and my Facebook account is now available]. Please see my post Facebook Available on the 8th Day!
So far, my Facebook account has been “unavailable” for 4 days.
Right off the bat, I must tell you that I understand that Facebook is provided to me for free and that it is further provided “AS IS” without any warranties. So with all that in mind, I would like to point out a few of the perils of allowing another entity to control access to your data.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing and cloud storage have been topics that I have followed with some interest. The thought of computing becoming available in much the same way as electricity’s availability is an intriguing thought, to say the least. And I’m sure that in the early days of converting to self-owned power plants to utility power plants, many manufacturers were uneasy about relegating such “power” to another entity, no matter how reliable they may be.
So when I contemplate a business relying on another business entity for its core computing needs, I bet a lot of concerns remain firmly lodged in the brains of those responsible for such a decision.
Service Level Agreement
Of course, any serious user of net storage, cloud computing or any other similar service has an agreement with the provider called a “Service Level Agreement” governing what is expected. An uptime guarantee of 99.9% would mean that your service could be down for 3.65 days per year. If the service covered by the agreement is down for longer that the prescribed number of hours, a payment credit is usually due to the customer.
Back to Facebook. Right now, Facebook has been unavailable to me for more than 4 days. This means that my level of service has dipped below the 99% mark FOR THE YEAR! In fact, at the moment, my YEARLY service level is at 98.9%. Tomorrow, if it is still unavailable, the service level will have dropped to 98.6%.
The Need for Redundancy
As Facebook is my connection to many of my friends, I have become quite used to having it available. It’s how many of my friends let me know what’s going on in their lives. I have built communication redundancy with many of my friends over Twitter. Further, if the relationship warrants it, I have the other person’s phone number or e-mail address.
In much the same way, the conversion of computing from in-house to outsourced is often accomplished with redundancy and multiple means of access to data and servers.
Outages as a Reminder
As IT professionals, CIO’s, CEO’s and other decision-makers use social media sites, they will inevitably run into the occasional service outage. Hopefully, when they are faced with these outages, it will remind them to review the Service Level Agreements they have in place with their current or future service providers. Predicting just how vulnerable your business is to an outage beyond your control might prove difficult, but the act of reviewing these vulnerabilities will go a long way to protect your business from such outages before they occur.
So here’s 4 days and counting. Every hour that goes by I am reminded that care must be taken when contemplating computing in the cloud. Outages beyond your control will occur. How you planned for such outages will play an important role in how well your business does when the time comes.
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