A couple of weeks ago a large Swedish service provider had a major incident on their storage solution. Slightly speaking; there was big BIG trouble for a lot of companies for a couple of days.
First you might think; “oh…not good…for them. But good for my business! Yes! $$$” Quoting Microsoft Word’s spell check; consider reverse. It’s definitely not good for the stroked provider, neither it’s good for the general cloud-, outsourcing- and SP business. People and companies will start to think they should withdraw from their provider or might stop a process to move to a provider. So, no; major incidents at other providers are not good for your business either.
One certain direct effect is that customer will closely check your process and most probably claim for higher penalties and indemnities. Note! I don’t say it’s bad to be reviewed or show how well prepared you are. But it will cost you in longer processes and time consumed to be reviewed. So, again; major incidents at other providers are not good for your business either.
One positive effect is that providers who can’t solve incidents fast and correct will drop off. That’s good for customers and the general business, somehow in a bad way because of bad publicity for providers in general and the actual loss for the customer.
We will always have incidents, regardless of on-premise, at an SP or in the cloud. The most important things are how you best avoid most of them, are well prepared and solve them fast and correct when they appear – ITIL service management at a glance.
Tip of the day! If you think it’s fun with other providers major incidents; laugh quiet and nice at home. In some way it will affect your business too. Tune your processes and security policies. Test and validate. Be well prepared, it might be your major incident the next time.
To all who says “keep it on-premise”;
If I return to my earlier blog post Don’t blame the cloud; what if the storage solution resided on-premise at the customer? I would say scary. If you even will be able to restore the data it probably will cost a lot to fix the problem. And the most important thing on top of this; the loss, including reputation, of doing business caused by the stop.
If as a service from a service provider, cloud or not, you have;
- SLA, normally* with penalties
- Normally* high level supporting services and agreements
- Normally* incident management included in the service
- Normally* indemnities for both direct and indirect loss
*Normally = serious and reliable service provider
Agree/disagree? Are major incidents at another provider good or bad for your business, in the long term?
I like this post. I actually like it alot!
ReplyDeleteIt is in no ones interest to bash the competition when there is a major incident. Instead it is important to learn from it and to mature as a market.
The Cloud market is still very your. Even the IT-market is still young. If the cloud market is a toddler then the IT-market is more like a teenager.. (by that I don't mean that it tries to break free from its parents, it is all about age here.. :))
I think that major incidents is good for the business because the business matures by experience hardships. But I think major incidents are bad for the business because not all customers sees it that way.. :)