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Cloud Businesses

How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud 290

Posted by samzenpus from the agent-of-change dept.
snydeq writes "Andrew Oliver offers further proof that drunk driving and on-site servers don't mix. Oliver, who had earlier announced a New Year's resolution to go all-in on cloud services, had that business strategy expedited when a drunk driver, fleeing a hit-and-run, drove his SUV directly into the beauty shop next door to his company's main offices. 'Our servers were down for eight hours, and various services were intermittent for at least 12 hours. Had things been worse, we could have lost everything. Like our customers, we needed HA and DR. Moreover, we thought, maybe our critical services like email, our website, and Jira should be in a real data center. This made going all-cloud a top priority for us rather than "when we get to it."' Oliver writes, detailing his company's resultant hurry-up migration plan to 100 percent cloud services."
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How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud More

How One Drunk Driver Sent My Company To the Cloud

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  • For all the drunks out there! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Linux User 33 ( 2988621 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:33AM (#44325517)
    I've been drunk the previous two weeks and it's been awesome!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jovius ( 974690 )

      Have you considered sending your brain to the cloud?

    • Re: For all the drunks out there! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @07:53AM (#44326101)

      Fake story. Obviously marketing hype for cloud services fad. Reminds me of Y2K

      • Re: For all the drunks out there! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MrMickS ( 568778 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:08AM (#44326525) Homepage Journal

        I understand it when people with no knowledge go on about Y2K as some sort of hoax. I despair when it comes from people that should no better.

        Any idea why Y2K didn't have the massive impact it could have? Would it be the massive effort testing and patching things to prevent it being a problem. Maybe we should have just left things and picked up the pieces afterwards. Yeah that would have been good. I know for a fact that there would have been issues with the emergency number (999) in the UK. Can you be sure that things would have worked wherever you're from?

        • If you are proactive and fix a problem before it causes an issue, then it obviously wasn't a problem, and you just wasted someone's money. [/end sarcasm]

        • Nobody argues there weren't things that really needed fixing. But there was also a lot of nice-to-haves that didn't have to be fixed at triple rates on rush schedules by anyone qualified to use a keyboard. It sailed by so smoothly I can't help to feel it was overhyped and overfixed. As in a paramedic can give you a band-aid, but it really wasn't necessary to go that far.

    • Re:For all the drunks out there! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gsgriffin ( 1195771 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:49AM (#44326901)
      The other issue here is that their servers and office are next door to a beauty salon.

  • why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:36AM (#44325531) Homepage Journal

    or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And what happens when a drunk driver smashes into them? (or his communications are cut?)

      • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @08:20AM (#44326233)

        Indeed, happened to Rackspace:

        http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/11/13/truck-crash-knocks-rackspace-offline/

        (Also lol, Web 2.0, blogosphere. Ah 2007...)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Happened to an ISP(dialup) I was with back in the 90's too. Sadly it took so long for the insurance company to finally pay out, that when they were finally able to relaunch, they weren't able to compete with the market anymore and they folded within 6 months.

      • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:58AM (#44326985) Homepage Journal

        And what happens when a drunk driver smashes into them? (or his communications are cut?)

        Well, for one, a lot more people are affected, and for another thing, they are not going to be as concerned about the data as you would be if you hosted it yourself.

    • Re: why cloud? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:43AM (#44325569)

      It's the latest buzz word. I'm sure if this had happened 100 years ago he'd be talking about moving everything to a building with electricity.

      He should have had his DR Plan in place rather than scrambling after his outage. I guess the cloud is where you go when your business forgot its umbrella.

    • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:51AM (#44325601)

      or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).

      Your Datacenter + Your HA/DR site = You control where data is replicated.

      Your data + Someone's cheap cloud service = You not having a damn clue when/where your data is replicated.

      It all depends on how critical you think your customer data is, and how much legal control you need.

      And a drunk driver should not be the damn justification line for HA/DR. Common fucking sense should. Mr. Oliver should have used some of that, and New Years Eve was over 7 fucking months ago. Procrastination kills, and my sympathy wanes.

      • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Stormthirst ( 66538 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @07:04AM (#44325859)

        And worse if it's hosted in the States (which most of them are), the NSA has access to all your company data too.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It is even worse than that.
          If you are hosted with ANY company that trades in the USofA then the NSA can have all your data. US Laws mean that to continue operating in the US, all companies must bend over and take a long one where it hurts when they are asked for YOUR data.
          So even if your 'cloud' is hosted here in Blighty if the company is Amerian or has a base in the US the NSA can still come a calling and there is nothing you can do about it.
           

    • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:33AM (#44325767)

      Yep, and it works vice versa too. What if your "cloud" data centre suffers downtime, what if your connection to it suffers downtime? Suddenly your staff can't do any work because you have nothing local anymore.

      Article sounds like a cloud services sales pitch tbh.

      • agreed. double up! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by leuk_he ( 194174 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:48AM (#44325797) Homepage Journal

        Yup. It is all fancy way to tell services are not in a local closet, but in a specialized center.

        It all seems fancy, until you hit downtime, and your SLA happens to be "best effort" and the response time is nothing more than someon looked at it within a certain time. You will never get a sla that returns money for the lost productivity.

        You will still have to figure out how to get your backups regularly out of the cloud, and retreive the data if the cloud operator stops. You will have to provide a fast internet link, or maybe even a double link, since if one provider fails, it might be cheaper to have a second provider instead of having one with a expensive business SLA.

        Stating "put it in the cloud"sounds simple, but a lot of details are really important. Notice how the Tarticle is a consulting firm in such things? and even they hoose to do in inhouse for quite some time?

      • One of my old office's clients had to go to dual ISPs after the switch to the Magic Cloud (tm). Otherwise, a brief Internet outage would grind the entire office to a halt. They now have their primary fiber connection, and then a secondary DSL connection that will automatically kick in when the fiber is offline (which is, like, once a week. Agh.)

        • exactly. cloud makes them more dependent on outside services which if you get an interruption say a drunk driver killing the local power and telecommunication grid then your completely fucked.

          His excuse for moving to the could is weak, the physical servers and data were probably fine. the local power/ communication lines where probably being repaired which was effecting his uptime more than the servers being on site.

          The only advantage of the cloud in such a case is you can make everyone work from home.

          • Agreed.

            But it's even simpler than that; if you are considering moving lock-stock-and-barrel to the cloud, ask yourself the following question first:

            Which is more likely to happen:
            a) A drunk driver smashes into your data-center (or there's a flood or a fire, or some other disaster)
            or
            b) your Internet goes down

            I don't know about you, but in my experience the second option is by far the more frequent occurrence. There are ways to mitigate the problem (but beware the b

            • Agreed.

              But it's even simpler than that; if you are considering moving lock-stock-and-barrel to the cloud, ask yourself the following question first:

              Which is more likely to happen:

              a) A drunk driver smashes into your data-center (or there's a flood or a fire, or some other disaster)
              or

              b) your Internet goes down

              Whoops! False dichotomy. It's not just about "your" internet, it is about all of your customer's internet access (you do have paying customers, right?) And yes, it is more likely that when your servers are "all in one basket" something bad will happen to them, more often than something bad happens at large. Especially when the servers (like in this story) are not in a place hardened against common outage causes (car accidents, backhoe>fiber accidents, transformer explosions, etc.)

              • I disagree. Most companies aren't serving directly to their customers. They aren't Amazon.com; their data is primarily for their in-house use. They aren't concerned if their customers can access the Internet because that's not how most business interact with their customers. They are very concerned whether or not their employees have access to the data, because if they do not they cannot do the job for which they are being paid. And even Internet-facing businesses need to be very concerned about their own

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by Holi ( 250190 )

                What do you mean my customer's internet. We are a manufacturer.We don't sell to end users. Our customers are best buy and the such. We moved our email to the cloud (Office 365) and we cannot wait until next year when we have planned to migrate back to our own servers. Having a cloud service it like having an IT department you can't fire who doesn't care about your business.

      • Beyond downtime what if your "cloud" service provider goes bankrupt. It isn't at all uncommon for failing companies to keep up the pretext of being viable and then just melt down over night. So you come in one morning only to find that some vital service with your data tied up in it has gone under. Now unless you are keeping some local backups you are in a world of hurt.

        Another thought on the whole bankruptcy thing is what happens to your data when the court starts selling off the assets of your former clo

    • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:41AM (#44325779)

      The "logic" seems to be:
      If we lost control of the security/secrecy our assets at our place ONCE, put it in a place where its security and secrecy is ALWAYS out of our control.
      But never ever learn anything about good data center or server room design.(What the hell kind of place is that, where you can drive straight through to the most secure back-office room of your company?? No fences? No brick walls? Nothing?? Because *I think* there might be their problem...)

      Because OMGCLOUDXORZ!!!111one(lim (x->0) ((sin x)/x))

      And because this is a Slashvertisement and 100% bullshit.

    • Re:why cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dejanc ( 1528235 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:48AM (#44325795)
      I am not ashamed of making a mistake when it comes to buzzwords, but the way I see it:

      - My site is hosted on a server in Acme Inc.'s facilities in New York / London / Tokyo. It's in a datacenter.
      - My site is hosted by Web2.0 Inc. I have no idea where it is, but I am hoping they are doing some smart load balancing and backups for me. It's in the cloud

    • or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).

      "The Cloud" when done right is hosted servers that can (and will) move around from place to place as fast as they need to; from local servers to in-country data centers to data centers around the world in order to optimize response time and minimize down time. Just because a lot of people do it wrong, doesn't mean the concept is wrong... Just really hard to understand.

    • (trick question.. it is).

      Master Yoda?!?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      or is it just the name for all datacenter hosted servers now? (trick question.. it is).

      It is not.

      If I simply owned/rented my own space in a datacenter and had racks there, it wouldn't be "cloud". Cloud hosting is more about certain technologies used in tandem to provide computing resources on demand and without the need to go through the purchase process of ordering, racking and stacking to provision new servers and networking for a specific requirement or task.

      Generalized computing also allows for a concentration of skilled IT Operations personnel into one group, focused on technology, and

  • SADD (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Servers Against Drunk Drivers

  • This proves that we need (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:38AM (#44325539)
    Self driving cars ...... but what if Google decides to use them to promote the cloud by taking out servers?

  • Colocation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:40AM (#44325549)
    This story isn't remarkable is it. Man shocked when putting all eggs in one basket is a bad idea. Solution: put all eggs in another basket. DR is what colocation and failover is for. The cloud doesn't magically make you impervious to disasters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zenin ( 266666 )

      That's the thing; Most (all?) the "cloud" providers are baking in DR. And redundancy (of everything). And load scaling. And CDN. And all at a fraction of the cost (especially upfront) of traditional hosting and management.

      If you think "cloud" is just a rebranding of colocation or even managed hosting, you really have a lot of learning to do. Just because it's hyped up doesn't mean there's nothing real there. Cloud hosting is a sea change.

      • They say they are, but I seem to recall a couple times that when Amazon went down, the whole thing went down, or enough of it what their redundancy wasn't enough to handle the increased load at the other data centers. You're better off (if possible) to just have servers in 2 unrelated data centers in different cities, and mirror data between them.

        • exactly, 'cloud' isn't a new name for co-located servers. Its a new name for VPS hosting (roughly).

          You could always have paid for rented physical servers that were set up for DR and HA - Rackspace in particular would sell you service to practically guarantee uptime (if not totally guarantee it), but the cost was a bit much for most people and I don't think they would do it with colocated servers.

          They, and others who aren't total cheap-ass hosts, still offer some form of HA service. As always you get what yo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Zenin ( 266666 )

            That's just it, it's much more then even VPSs. Sure you can just use them as VPSs, and a lot of folks find that's the easiest first step into the cloud since it's all largely familiar. They still have "servers", they still connect the dots in the same way with the same tools and same terms.

            That said, almost no one has much interest in VPSs. Not the providers, not the developers. It's all the same work (and shortcomings) as before, with a slight cost savings. That technology isn't advancing, no one real

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tibit ( 1762298 )

              But you see, as someone who has too much knowledge of "random" communications protocols as applied in very heterogenous industrial control environments, the "gluing of the features" is where all of the problems are. Gluing together a heterogenous system, even if it's made accessible via a uniform interface (say SOAP), is always fraught with problems. The fact that the interface is uniform doesn't mean that all of its behaviors are specified. It's business as usual when the critical behaviors such as failove

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by putaro ( 235078 )

          Amazon is kind of broken in that way. They have "availability zones" (essentially DC's) and you need to replicate across availability zones yourself to recover from a major disaster. Big players can do that and little players usually aren't savvy enough to understand that Amazon is more hype than reality in that arena.

          However, there are other players coming along who will be providing those services.

          A question I have is how much money do they lose if their little DC is down and how does that relate to the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        "If you think "cloud" is just a rebranding of colocation or even managed hosting, you really have a lot of learning to do."

        Boy, have you ever drunk the Kool Aid and then some.

        "Just because it's hyped up doesn't mean there's nothing real there. Cloud hosting is a sea change."

        Remind us what happened to Azure a while back....

      • Afaict "cloud" services can be divided into roughly three categories.

        1: infrastructure as a service
        2: software as a service with publically available software (e.g. exchange, mysql, apache, whatever).
        3: software as a service with vendor specific software (e.g. google apps for your domain).

        Each has different risks and benefits

        With the first category the cloud provider provides you with the ability to quickly and easilly spool up instances (effectively temporary VMs), networks, storage etc but it's still your

  • Why would you not have critical system on a back-up power system? Generator? Something. It sounds like poor planning more then anything.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      Because when a car drivers over your computer, a generator isn't going to do it much good?

  • Bad design Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MortenMW ( 968289 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:44AM (#44325575)
    If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself. The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.

    • Re:Bad design Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FireFury03 ( 653718 ) <slashdot@NoSPAm.nexusuk.org> on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:31AM (#44325759) Homepage

      If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.

      The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.

      Because cloud services have never [msdn.com] had [gigaom.com] extended [cio.co.uk] outages [informationweek.co.uk]...

      Honestly, anyone who sees cloud services as the great fix for reliability problems is an idiot, especially reliability problems caused by a once-in-a-lifetime drunk-driver incident. Most of the cloud services seem to have had their fair share of incompetence-related downtime. I wouldn't mind betting that if he'd put all his IT stuff one one of the commercial cloud platforms for the last 2 years, he would've had more downtime than he had running them in his offices.

      In any case, shoving stuff in the cloud doesn't absolve you of needing a competent IT admin to handle backups and such, unless you're insane enough to trust *everything* to a cloud operator who, at the end of the day, doesn't actually give too much of a crap about one tiny customer who might've lost all their data.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kijori ( 897770 )

      If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.

      This seems a bit harsh. I would say that in general, if you're running a small business and you think a single drunk driver can't potentially stop your production for eight hours (as happened here), you're either kidding yourself or paranoid.

      If you read the article, the driver hit the shop next-door, severing the gas main and filling the buildings with gas. At some point during either the crash or the firefighters' entry their internet access was knocked out. Now, migrating all their services online protect

      • It might be a bit harsh but still, if the production is critical and you expect it to work at all times you can't be surprised when shit happens if you don't have a good and tested plan. Moving everything to the cloud does not necessarily solve this issue. What if "something" happens to the cloud provider? What if someone hacks your prod system? What if you accidentally delete your data?

        You still need a backup, you still need a distaster recovery plan, you still need some sort of HA solution and you still n

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tibit ( 1762298 )

        Let's get real: what they have done is a classic otherwise known as buying insurance after something bad happens. IOW: always always a stupid move, since you by definition react irrationally (based on fear etc.). A business must have reserves and planning for dealing with downtime. For most small businesses, it's cheapest to acknowledge some loss of revenue in case of certain externalities. Providing failover/protection from those externalities will be just like buying insurance, except that you're self ins

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tibit ( 1762298 )

      Oh come on, the business they are in is called Open Software Integrators, they are a consulting firm. I don't know what the fuck they are doing that they can't swallow an 24hr downtime, give-or-take. It's just completely blown out of proportion, and they are overreacting instead of following their gradual move-to-cloud plan. They are very silly.

  • Lesson not learnt (Score:3)

    by Ckwop ( 707653 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:46AM (#44325593) Homepage

    The issue here is that he didn't have adequate disaster recovery procedures and policies.

    The standard solution to this sort of problem is that you have a backup system that sits off site ready to take the load should something happen to primary. This backup system should be located in another data center, with a different ISP etc.

    Moving to the cloud doesn't solve this, per se, if you move all your infrastructure to say Amazon you're still beholden to that company and its internal procedures. A system administration on their part could easily render you down for many hours.

    The lesson hasn't been learnt.

    • Re:Lesson not learnt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:11AM (#44325681)

      Moving to the cloud doesn't solve this, per se, if you move all your infrastructure to say Amazon you're still beholden to that company and its internal procedures. A system administration on their part could easily render you down for many hours.

      A data loss on their part could render you down permanently; Do you have a SLA? Do you have proof that your cloud vendors have DR solutions?

      What is your action plan if your leased-line WAN goes down, and your internet service provider tells you that it will be 48 to 72 hours to resolve? May be a fiber cut, or worse. Drunk drivers can take down networks and POPs too.

      • Re:Lesson not learnt (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:19AM (#44325711)

        What is your action plan if your leased-line WAN goes down, and your internet service provider tells you that it will be 48 to 72 hours to resolve? May be a fiber cut, or worse. Drunk drivers can take down networks and POPs too.

        When your complete IT is based on SaaS, just send everyone home and let them work from home. All the tools they need are "in the cloud" (or however plain old internet is called today)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mysidia ( 191772 )

          When your complete IT is based on SaaS, just send everyone home and let them work from home. All the tools they need are "in the cloud"

          That requires prior planning, and probably requires you to pay for your workers' internet connections or reimburse some portion of their fees.... Your workers might not otherwise have the appropriate connectivity to do this. It also won't work, if the network affecting issue also takes out your workers' home connectivity and effects multiple ISPs in the area -- t

          • Yes, but how likely is that?

            If the problem takes down multiple ISP, it would break your datacenter too if you connected to those ISPs. Even if you plan redundant ISP connections for your datacenter, you'll probably pick 2-4 different ones. Chances are much higher, that the ISPs in your employees homes are much more diverse and it would take a much larger outage to take down ALL of the ISPs your people subscribed to, than it takes to take out those 2 that connect your datacenter.

            The same is true for the regi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by putaro ( 235078 )

          Ummmm...yeah. I guess you don't need phones, what was on people's desks, etc. That's a nice fantasy but if you were using the office there's probably stuff in it that you need besides the IT stuff.

          • If that is the case, what exactly are your emergency plans for any non-cloud related incidents like your office burning down?

            OK.. Let me check my desk here at the office:

            Desktop-PC with keyboard, mouse two monitors. My home PC only has conencted 1 monitor, that would slow me down, but not keep me from working

            Phone: VOIP-Phone. Better than a software client, but a software client is much better than the scorching remains of a phone that burnt down along with the rest of the office.

            A few notes and printouts.

    • The standard solution to this sort of problem is that you have a backup system that sits off site ready to take the load should something happen to primary. This backup system should be located in another data center, with a different ISP etc.

      Which is the right thing to do, but very costly. There is a wide range of businesses that are way to small for their own datacenter, let alone two of them, but too big to keep all their business documents on the boss' PC and backup on a USB-HD in his home.

      Inbetween these, this is where such services makes sense.

  • Someone would have been injured or killed.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Now, if a drunk driver runs into the "cloud" datacenter, what will you do? Go to the heavens?

  • Seems the main problem here (as already noted by others) was a lack of DR facility not moving to the cloud. But this is the same for many SMB's, requirements for a decent internet connection (not in the costs and quite a bit) and you STILL need a DR solution for alot of the stuff. Googles and others have suffered outages.

    Also they've struggled with the online versions of the accounts and expenses system, just because it's a SaaS solution doesn't mean it any good!

    Also moving from internal BIND to GoDaddy for

  • 100 percent cloud services? (Score:3)

    by dgharmon ( 2564621 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:57AM (#44325837) Homepage
    Didn't this cloud used to be known as hosted services, the only difference being that your server is now some VM running on shared hardware and you still have to hire someone to configure/install and upgrade your computing infrastructure.

  • so what happens (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:59AM (#44325841)
    What happens when a 'drunken' MBA cancels the service. Or a drunken admin deprovisions the wrong servers?
  • Sometimes HA and DR is accomplished by having your data mirrored to various data centers. Worst case, you do not even know in which jurisdiction the data centers are. Suddenly, your data is governed by the law of another country. If you live in a police state, this might not frighten you. For some of us, the result is not normal.
    • ...or worse, your data may be governed by the laws of multiple countries because that "cloud" provider has servers in both the U.S. and Europe and shuttles backups across the pond (which is good from a backup standpoint, but bad from a security standpoint)

  • Why the hurry? the probability of something as catastrophic like the car accident on your datacenter happening again is lower now, you can now proceed with the transition to the cloud or colocation service with the same speed than before.

  • wtf (Score:4)

    by sacrilicious ( 316896 ) <qbgfynfu.opt@recursor.net> on Friday July 19, 2013 @07:40AM (#44326043) Homepage

    Like our customers, we needed HA and DR.

    I guess I'm supposed to go scrambling for my acronym dictionary, but I just don't care. I'll assume he means laughter and medial attention.

  • Drunk drivers have been sending things to the clouds for a hundred years.

    Wait. That's not funny. :-/

  • Moving all your data and/or application to "the cloud" does not eliminate the need for it to be stored on and served from a physical machine.

    All it does is make the server it is stored on part of some giant datacenter owned by Amazon or Rackspace or something, rather than part of some smaller data center owned by you. Oh, and that for a fee.

  • Works for a small enough company (Score:3)

    by Attila Dimedici ( 1036002 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @08:18AM (#44326229)
    I work for a company that would have been in a good place, and better off than they were, if they had gone to the cloud a year or more before they hired me. However, they hired me because they were experiencing rapid growth and part time IT support from brother of one of the owners was not longer adequate. When they hired me their IT infrastructure was about three years overdue for replacement from top to bottom. The owners wanted to go to the cloud as part of that change. As we investigated options it became obvious that we had outgrown where the cloud would have been a good solution for us (it is not just size, it is also the way that we do business). We are at a size where it is cost effective to build out our own server infrastructure, including what is needed to ensure business continuity rather than pay someone else for it. The cloud might be a viable option as the location for our business continuity redundancy, but it is not cost effective as the location for our day to day operations.

  • Reality.... (Score:3)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @08:27AM (#44326265) Homepage

    They were running on a badly designed system to begin with. Honestly. why did they not have an offsite failover? If 8 hours of downtime is expensive then the CIO needs to be fired for his incompetence for not having a failover system in place.

  • I don't think this level of stupidity and ignorance can be increased.

  • moron (Score:3)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:22AM (#44326641)
    Well, I hope he enjoys lots more downtime now that everything is in the cloud except 0% chance of him fixing it himself. And just wait for that extended downtime when the cloud host goes out of business without warning.

  • So when a drunk driver takes out the electric or a backhoe chops your internet cable your company is still in the dark for those same 8 hours. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference if your servers are onsite or offsite, your employees can't work. If you move all of your data and services to the web you could have your employees work from home but if your workflow includes locally installed software then forget it. And lets not forget we have an ongoing scandal of big web companies happily handing over ou

  • As your direct competitor I've had RIAA, MPAA, FBI notices sent to those sites because
    you may have violated some law.

      There is now an ongoing raid to seize all the computers and data at those sites
      and they promise to return them in a year or two.

  • The 30 second version (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Friday July 19, 2013 @11:43AM (#44328311) Homepage

    "How One Bolting Horse Sent My Company Close The Stable Door: We had no high availability or disaster recovery in place, so when a disaster happened our systems weren't available and we couldn't recover from it. That was bad, so we fixed it."

    Next week's article will be "How Losing All Of Our Data Made My Company Start Making Backups", followed in September by "How Losing All Of Our Data A Second Time Made My Company Start Testing The Backups Too".

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