Will Office 365 Cloud Issues be 24/7?
May 26, 2011
As I write this, I heard about Amazon’s super reliable, scalable, elastic, whiz bang cloud service struggling to deliver a pop icon’s album to fans. I have concluded that Amazon’s service can fail and not scale. But Amazon is just one cloud marketer struggling to make the dreams of the marketing department into the reality of cloud services as ultra reliable.
Consider Microsoft, please.
If there is one rule left in the business environment, it is that you do not mess with a worker’s email. Perhaps Microsoft did not get that memo? Last week MS’s latest incarnation of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office 365, had some serious cloud issues. According to “Microsoft’s Handling of BPOS Outage an Ill Omen for Office 365”, users saw delays totaling up to fifteen hours spread across a three-day span.
The author himself admits that it isn’t so much the outages that are the cause for concern but the manner of handling the issue by Microsoft. Not that the inhabitants of your average cube farm won’t automatically freak out over any interruption in email services, but they could rest easier if they at least had an idea of what was happening behind the scenes.
To calm the harried nerves of its customers, Microsoft created the Online Service Health Dashboard, with an intention to provide up to the minute status of cloud services and tools. If you think you can rest easy now, not so fast. The article said:
The first detailed Dashboard notification I can find on the Tech Center forum is time stamped 9:40 a.m. on Thursday. That’s two full days after the original notice. Dave Thompson notified the world about the problems, via his blog, at 6 p.m. But there were two full days of widespread intermittent email outages without any explanation from Microsoft. Yes, there were service degradation icons on the Dashboard earlier, but no explanations or ETA for a fix.
Call me naive, but what’s the point in having a notification board when it takes two days to post notifications?”
And Google? Well, its vaunted technology failed during its I/O conference when executives were chatting up the reliability of the Google cloud. Blogger.com, however, must have been on break. That service went down for 20 hours.
Welcome to the cloud, a sometimes gray area where you are not privy to the same information on controls and status you would find within an average business enterprise.
That, my friends, can be the trade-off for convenience. Besides, if your company is anything like mine, you wouldn’t be getting much more support from your in-house IT anyway.
But when I can save $11 on a hot new album, I am flexible. For work, I am not so flexible. My hunch is that others may have a similar view. What happens when cloud based search fails? I won’t be able to find my documents. Not good.
Sarah Rogers, May 26, 2011
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