“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu
In the last several weeks, Amazon, VMWare and Playstation have all suffered public failures that rippled through networks, leaving many businesses without service. These failures reiterate the truth that technology is no substitute for strategy.
This simple truth reaches far beyond the IT world to every phase of life. As Sun Tzu so aptly captured “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Recent IT technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, and borderless networking are tactics that must fit into a larger strategy that includes redundancy as a part of an overall contingency plan.
Unfortunately, sometimes c-level executives buy into new technologies because a charismatic salesperson captures their imagination. Without a proper planning and safeguards, these technologies could be like giving a business leaders enough rope to hang themselves.
Cloud computing offers great potential for cost savings, flexibility, and streamlined management, but at the same time it’s still in infancy. It’s like a big baby that still crawls, but he’s wearing a diaper. Without that diaper, things could get messy real fast.
Last month, the much touted Amazon Web Services crashed, impacting large and small sites across the web (See Bloomberg). At 5:00 am on April 21, Amazon servers in Norther Virginia suffered an outage. Major sites like Foursquare, Hootsuite, and Reddit lost service. Salesforce.com Inc.’s Heroku unit went down for more than eight hours, which in turn impacted companies that rely on Heroku like Best Buy and Comcast. Suddenly the silver lining in the cloud turned to acid rain as network after network crashed.
Vanessa Alvarez, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc., challenged companies to have broader strategy. She explained, “The outage is evidence that companies can’t wholly rely on cloud services to handle important functions.”
“Customers need to start asking tough questions and not assume everything will be taken care of in the cloud, because it will not,” Alvarez said. “They shouldn’t be counting on a cloud service provider like Amazon to provide disaster recovery.”
Last week, Vmware’s new cloud service, the Cloud Foundry also crashed. The first failure resulted from a power outage that lasted nearly 10 hours and was fixed by the afternoon. “But the next day, VMware officials accidentally caused a second outage while developing an early detection plan to prevent the kind of problem that hit the service the previous day.” (See Networked World)
Human error and technological failure resulted in service outage, blocking users out of their control panels.
While many companies suffered downtime as result of these various network failures, one company thrived in the midst of the challenge. Netflix was prepared for failure. David Aspey, vice-president of cloud security for Trend Micro, says, “The outage had nearly no effect on them.”
Why? Netflix plans to fail constantly. Over at The Netflix “Tech” Blog, Netflix responded to the AWS failure. They write, “Why were some websites impacted while others were not? For Netflix, the short answer is that our systems are designed explicitly for these sorts of failures. When we re-designed for the cloud this Amazon failure was exactly the sort of issue that we wanted to be resilient to. Our architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and the SimpleDB, S3 and Cassandra services that we do depend upon were not affected by the outage.”
Netflix prepared for the worst, and the cloud debacle didn’t immobilize their services.
Integracon recognizes and promotes the value of cloud computing to our clients. But at the same time, we recommend a strategy that includes multiple, redundant data centers. As recent events have shown, networks events dramatically impact the 100M+ investors as well as the local service providers and businesses. There is no substitute for disaster planning as a part of an overall comprehensive strategy.
To learn more about developing a contingency plan for your business, please contact us at 865-330-2323 or chat via Integracon.
