Reply to post: Broccoli

Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe

Chika
Coat

Broccoli

A few weeks ago, I was taking part in an interview for a job doing support for a company that specialised in a particular software product (I won't name any names for obvious reasons). One thing that I noticed was that pretty much everything that they did was cloud based, so one question I brought up was what the company did to cover themselves in the case of an outage.

I'm not sure if they really understood where I was coming from but as a long term support operative for local based servers and for locally based SAN storage, I knew full well that a dodgy server had its effects on customers but that we could normally alleviate the problem one way or another, often without having to wait for somebody to sort out a system somewhere in the "cloud". More importantly we could pinpoint the fault and often give an idea of how long it would be before we could bring the affected system back online.

This was because the various points of failure that were likely to occur were onsite. With this whole business with Azure/O365, the various points of failure are out of the control of the customers' IT, whether it is an Internet fail, a DDoS or a malfunction at the farm. If your entire system is out on a cloud somewhere and that cloud suddenly evaporates, apart from fielding hordes of complaints from exasperated users, what do you do?

Oh yes, I also managed to sprain my ankle on the way to the interview. Suffice to say that I was not impressed at all (and have spent much of the last couple of weeks in bed trying to rest it, mostly because standing up was extremely painful.)

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