The importance of being up

Posted on 27. Jun, 2011 by Andy in Huddle comment

Last week saw two notable security and uptime snafus. Firstly, cloud sync and backup startup DropBox left a gaping security hole in their application after a product upgrade last weekend. According to The Register, a bug in DropBox’s authentication system enabled anyone to log into any account and access their content. This was fixed after approximately four hours and could, potentially, have affected hundreds of thousands of accounts.

Secondly, just a week before the release of its long-awaited Office 365 cloud suite, Microsoft suffered an embarrassing three hour outage on its BPOS service, reported Business Insider. BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite, encompassing SharePoint, Exchange and other tools) is the predecessor to Office 365 and launched in 2007 as a single-tenant (i.e. One customer per server) hosted alternative to traditional on-premise deployments. The BPOS service has suffered multiple failures since its launch with its primary cloud competitor, Google Apps, quick to point out that the service was never designed to be delivered via the cloud. Like Google Apps, Huddle was engineered from the ground up to work in the cloud and scale elastically as usage grew.

Like most true cloud companies, the Huddle team is fanatical about uptime. We understand that the reason many businesses choose the cloud is because they want to have access to their data wherever they are and whenever they want. As service providers, if we can’t provide access to that data then we’re failing. And it’s not just the providers who care about uptime and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) – purchasers can get as hung up on the numbers as we do. While it’s important to establish what your service provider’s SLA is, the question you should be asking is: what uptime has your system had over the last three/six/twelve months? SLAs provide reassurance, but no amount of money will compensate for the damage done to your business should the service go down. Your reputation is at stake and your provider should be willing to reveal their uptime. You also need to query if the uptime statistics include scheduled maintenance. Downtime is downtime, whether it’s scheduled or not. This leads me nicely onto the question of the uptime ‘nines’.

We’re very proud to offer all of our customers a minimum of 99.9% uptime and are currently running at 99.992% over the last 90 days (check out the stats in real-time here). But what do these numbers mean in the real world? You’ll often hear cloud service providers talking about multiple nines when referring to their uptime: 99.9%, 99.99%, 99.999% and so on. Rather than simply assuming that you need as many nines as possible, consider what the business impact of the relative minutes of downtime a week and/or month will be. For example, 99.9% uptime equates to 10.1 minutes downtime a week, 99.99% is 1.01 minutes a week and 99.999% is 6.05 seconds of downtime per week.

Given its complete re-architecture, will Office 365 fix Microsoft’s tarnished reputation for providing reliable cloud applications? Early reviews have been mixed, with many analysts claiming the 28 June launch date is simply too aggressive given the number of outstanding issues reported.

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The death of the traditional enterprise

Posted on 25. May, 2011 by Zuzanna in Huddle, Huddle comment

A few weeks ago, I presented at Internet World in London on the death of the traditional enterprise. Here are my thoughts.

So, why the death of the enterprise? How will it die exactly? Of old age? With the decay of time? I believe it will die in battle. We are on an unavoidable collision course. The unstoppable force that is the business community is about to reach an immovable object – the IT department.

Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with the phrase: the consumerization of IT. It’s effectively what’s driving the explosion of Enterprise 2.0. and contributing to the death of the traditional enterprise model. In their personal lives, people have the ability to communicate, share information and run personal projects using a plethora of readily available and easy-to-use tools. They can buy an application on their smartphone with a single tap and expect the same power and simplicity to be available in the workplace.

Death of the traditional enterprise – IT and users on a collision course

View more presentations from Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson

Younger generations in the workplace are no longer happy with being dictated to by a central IT department. People want to manage their own work, organize their own content and use the tools that they feel are the best for the job. The business community now wants its requirements to be fulfilled as quickly as in the consumer world.

The best example of this trend is the explosion of mobile devices in the workplace. There are few business folk who do not use a personal iPhone or BlackBerry to check work emails or to communicate with colleagues. Think about the number of times you’ve done some work on your home computer. Using personal devices for work is so engrained in our lives that we don’t even think about it. However, your IT department does care.

The consumertization of IT is growing. A recent survey conducted by IDC revealed that 95 per cent of workers have used technology that they have purchased for work. IDC also notes that there is a disconnect between employees and employers about how consumer technologies are used in the enterprise.

How big is this disconnect? IDC’s findings show that it’s very much a case of the left hand having no idea what the right hand is doing. According to the survey:

• Workers use consumer devices at twice the rate employers reported
• Workers are dissatisfied with the level of support IT provides for consumer technologies
• More than half of workers believe that they can store personal data on the company network, overestimating support from the employers.

And let’s not forget the issue of social media. Although employers want to increase the use of social networking in business over the next year, few are integrating those technologies into existing enterprise applications. Many organizations (40 per cent) lack guidelines for social media use in the workplace.

Finally (and unsurprisingly), tech savvy workers want to work for tech-savvy employers, but only about one third of employers recognize this.

The business community wants to use apps that help them work efficiently, here and now. However, the IT department puts out a tender and then takes three months to decide on and implement a technology that it is comfortable with. The IT department often opts for traditional systems, because they are considered safe. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

I share Accenture’s sentiment: IT needs to get with the program and understand that organizations are going to demand a much more transparent and agile method of IT delivery in the future. People want to get things done with a single tap rather than go through a three month tender process.

The issue of control is at the heart of this Enterprise 2.0 debate, but there’s still time to prevent a war between the workforce and central IT. And it’s IT that needs to balance the demands for flexibility, fast delivery and openness with security and control.

In a few years, the question of whether the cloud is a viable replacement for on-premise technologies will be redundant. Cloud computing, and Software as a Service in particular, has come of age. And IT’s concerns about security, control, adoption and ROI are starting to be addressed.

To avoid a complete annihilation of the IT department, IT has to give in to the cloud. It works. Converted IT managers cite simplified IT management processes, improved end-user experience, a reduction in IT performance challenges, reduced pressure on internal resources as key cloud benefits. And then there’s the question of money. With no set-up costs and lower variable costs, cloud-based software wins.

In my blog tomorrow, I’ll continue to cover the issues that I presented at Internet World, starting with: How secure is the cloud?

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