IBM’s McAfee-as-a-service cloudy antivirus wobbled for nearly a day IBM’s cloud experienced an “unplanned event” that caused its McAfee-as-a-service offering to operate with sub-par performance for nearly a day. “At approximately 0347 AM UTC on June 20, engineers with Compute Infrastructure identified a database issue that necessitated the restoration of a key update repository for McAfee …
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It sounds like one or more ePO management servers went tits-up for a time. That would prevent new policies and tasks from being sent to machines as well as any metrics from being gathered centrally, but it would not prevent the existing software from running client-side. It also would not prevent DAT files (AV or otherwise) from being pulled directly from McAfee, the default last resort repository, unless previously specified by policy in which case they could still be updated manually.
The point of this framework is that it can suffer an outage of this nature and still continue to provide protection.
Surely the scale of the issue (27 data centres) would be beyond what a single ePO instance could manage if it was the cause of the outage? And if the ePO service had been scaled out (i.e. via region or customer), then surely they wouldn't manage to screw them all at once?
I say surely, but maybe the take up of the service has been particularly low...
Surely the scale of the issue (27 data centres) would be beyond what a single ePO instance...
Just taking a guess that it was a single ePO server that had the issue from this statement:
"...engineers with Compute Infrastructure identified a database issue that necessitated the restoration of a key update repository for McAfee Antivirus services from backup."
I was basing it on the idea that IBM has set things up to use a single ePO server as their main repository. It is possible to do this and has some benefits in terms of restricting outside access and allowing custom modules to be rolled out, but it also creates a single point of failure.
McAfee made it clear it didn't want my family's business years ago when first it refused to install on my Windows 98 system merely because I didn't have Internet Explorer 6 installed, then a half decade later when I tried to help my mother renew her McAfee subscription but was refused because her billing postal code coincidentally was also used in a Middle Eastern region and the idiot payment processor developers were too lazy to actually correlate the user's postal code with the rest of the address.
I recently bought a new laptop that came with a one-year subscription of McAfee antivirus. Day one, I uninstalled McAfee and installed something else.
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