Reply to post: Re: A message to all who thought Office 365 was a good idea

Re: A message to all who thought Office 365 was a good idea

"I think the difference is keeping people in the loop. If a failure occurs then a good IT department will liaise with management to say what the problem is, how it is being dealt with, and when things are likely to be fully working again. The mouthpiece imparting that news is the IT Department themselves, not a PR representative of the IT Department. The difference is that if the Client has a question to ask regarding such news, that the mouthpiece has the answers - whatever that question is - at his/her fingertips. So if the question is asked "are my messages safe? Nothing's going to be lost?" a sensible answer is given, rather than one which bows to the legal profession for its content."

With all due respect, I have been in many of these crisis situations. In most cases, if something is really screwed up, it is not the IT department doing much of anything other than giving high level support/engineering from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, EMC, pick your vendor access to systems and logs. If it gets to crisis mode where something is down hard, that means that IT hasn't been able to figure it out. The bottleneck is still the vendor and it is still on them to fix the problem. Often times the executives want to speak directly with IBM, EMC, etc for those hourly updates as IT is just relaying information they heard. Regardless of vendor, there would be some sort of hourly conference bridge open to provide an update. Generally the vendor assigns a resolution owner to be the point person to discuss all of those questions people have.

Now you do run into an issue with cloud as when something goes wrong it isn't one customer impacted but likely many... maybe even thousands. While I'm sure a vendor would be happy to sell you some premium service where you can get someone to explain things, I think the benefit of cloud is that, if there is a wide spread impact, you know that every person at that IT vendor from the CEO down is working on fixing that issue as soon as humanly possible, at any cost... which is why these cloud issues do get fixed quickly (although they really shouldn't happen at all). If your Exchange environment has issues, MS will certainly work with you to fix it but it isn't really a crisis for MS's management and you likely have the attention of one support engineer. It could linger on longer than required due to resources. This is not specific to MS, true of every vendor... just the way vendor support works. If Europe's Exchange environment has issues, you can rest assured that everyone will be working on it and it will be fixed even if it costs millions of dollars/pounds.