"Microsoft Mail Delivery May Be Delayed (Resolved--mail
delivery restored)"
Like many others, my college had decided that it was more
economical to allow Microsoft to handle all of its email as part of its Cloud
services.
"Update: Microsoft reports that the problem
which caused delays in mail delivery today was fixed this afternoon at 4:30
p.m. The problem existed from 8:10 a.m. until 4:20 p.m. and delayed delivery to
and from the Internet to district email; delivery between college recipients
was not impacted. We have already begun a dialog with Microsoft to find better
and faster methods to alert us of outages like today’s so that we can let you
know more promptly. Fortunately these outages have proven extremely rare since
last summer’s move Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud services—nonetheless I know how
disruptive today’s problems were for all of us (the problem even delayed the
delivery of documents scanned from our departmental copier/scanners which are
sent to our inboxes; online faxing was also impacted)."
This is just the tip of the iceberg, I thought ...
I could see the lure, which was evident in the rest of the
email.
"That outages like today’s are infrequent is very
important—especially in light of the announcement you’ll receive tomorrow
morning telling you about several additional features we’ve just added to the
district’s Office 365 subscription. You will have as much storage for documents
as you need (up to 1 TB) in Microsoft’s cloud in a service called OneDrive for
Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro), an online forum called Yammer (some think of
it as Facebook-like but only those with a college email can join) and browser
versions of Word, Excel and other apps which together are known as Office
Online. Office Online will let you create and edit Office documents from nearly
any device—including Android and Apple mobile devices."
Ah, the convenience.
Ah, the accessibility. Ah, the
consolidation. Ah, the savings!
Ah, the potential for disaster!!!
I've worked in a few institutions that have given me an
insight into the perils and pitfalls of Cloud-like solutions and the consolidation
of resources. I've worked as the IT
go-to person for three departments in a large Federally sponsored research
project, as a manager for a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) and in a
support role for an ISP that was at the time, the largest web hosting company in
the world, and have seen their "best laid" plans come to (or close
to) naught.
The Research facility had implemented a cost-saving measure
that required any of the 1200 employees to temporarily lease a license for a
Microsoft Office product before being able to edit a document on their
computers. There were a limited number
of licenses, and commonly, there were not enough to go around, so you had to
"wait!" Additionally, their
network was prone to failure due to the many electrical storms that occurred at
that time. My departments dealt with
oversight issues and needed to work evenings and weekends, and many times found
the network non-functional when they arrived, and no one available to support
it. Local copies of the software and a
prayer that the power for the facility didn't go out was the solution at the
time.
The local ISP had the insight to pay for the insurance of a
secondary connection to the Internet, which paid off on the day that a backhoe
took out the fiber of their primary connection and their 50,000 customers had
to limp along for a few days on the greatly reduced capacity of the secondary
connection. Without this forward
thinking, all these customers would have been dead in the water.
The giant web hosting company was in the process of
consolidating the dozens of smaller ISP's into their system. They moved thousands of customers from their
many email processing servers and networks to their single email server cluster
on a single branch of one of their networks.
Within weeks, they had a major failure of the email system that lasted a
couple of days, and had to explain the failure to not what had been thousands
but was now hundreds of thousands of personal and business customers. Definitely a support nightmare!
Yes, things are much more redundant now. Yes, there are many more fail-safes in the
systems now. But are there really? This failure with Microsoft should have been
impossible (not infrequent). Microsoft systems
may be fine, but who controls the Internet infrastructure? Who controls the limited number of Internet
Exchange Points that the functioning of the Internet relies on and just how
reliable are they? Yes there are
redundancies in the network, but I have seen large portions of the Internet go
down for hours, sometimes due to technical failure, sometimes due to
sabotage. Do we really want to run our
entire society on systems that may be prone to failure, that possibly may stay
down for long lengths of time, and that thereby may cripple our processes,
businesses and infrastructure? Think of
all the complaints about historic transportation strikes (trains, busses,
planes), these resulted in such an uproar that the Federal government had to step
in, to stop these "blockages to our ways of life." What would we do if the problems are beyond
the help of the governments, when most government or business entities are no
longer accessible, since they require Internet connection to communicate with
them, when all cellular phone or VoIP system communication is down, since they
use the same network as the Internet, when your computer at work or home is
useless, since all the programs it uses may need to be verified at an online
location before use, and since all of your company/organization data is
inaccessible off on a Cloud that you can not access. Government and businesses would grind to a
halt. At the same time, many security
systems would be down, since they use remote connections to the Internet. Criminals may just be waiting for this kind
of opportunity. Stronger and stronger
ties to the net will eventually potentially result in the shutdown of power
plants, planes and automobiles.
Yes, it is "the more economical path" to take,
now, but in the long run, we may wish we had thought this through more carefully.
