Bob Warfield: What to Do When Your Cloud is Down

This post is on behalf of the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

As I write this, Amazon is having a major East Coast outage that has affected Heroku, Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and others. Heroku’s status page is just the sound of a lost sheep bleating repeatedly for its mother in heavy fog. What’s a poor sheep to do about this problem anyway? After all, isn’t a Cloud-based service dead once it’s Cloud is dead?

Rather than wringing our hands and shaking our heads about “That Darned Cloud, I knew this would happen”, let’s talk about it a bit, because there are some things that can and should be done. Enterprises wanting to adopt the Cloud will want to have thought through these issues and not just avoided them by avoiding the Cloud. In the end, they’re issues every IT group faces with their own infrastructure and there are strategies that can be used to minimize the damage.

I remember a conversation with a customer when I was a young Vice President of R&D at Borland, then a half a billion dollar a year software company (I miss it). This particular customer was waxing eloquent about our Quattro Pro spreadsheet, but they just had one problem they wanted us to solve: they wanted Quattro Pro not to lose any data if the user was editing and there was a power outage.

More of the Smoothspan post from Bob Warfield

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.