Today Salesforce has an outage affecting mostly its north american and some European customers. We are taking this opportunity to remind customers that just because a company is large and famous, doesn’t mean that they don’t have outages.
In this article, we talk about the consequences and pros to betting your entire company on one of these types of companies. Do you have a Disaster Recovery plan? If so, does it include a company separate to the one that you currently perform your business on? Is there any part of your business that depends on a system that’s not redundant? Its ok if that’s the case, the idea is to know that’s the situation and plan for its potential failure as best you can.
SALESFORCE
Our customers know that we have been integrating our software solutions like BePro Listings with Salesforce. We believe that companies like this provide a very real need to help businesses scale operations. However, we have also been very vocal about the limitations of these services. We are major advocates of backing up all of your leads before forwarding them to Salesforce.
Today, Salesforce blamed the issue on a database script which removed access limitations for users. This script was in the process of being deployed across their systems when they noticed the issue and locked down access to the affected accounts. Until accounts were frozen, company staff which should only have the ability to enter information, could access all of their company’s customer data stored in Salesforce. For those not in the know, customer data is huge money. Companies spend a lot of money to capture the data. Competitors spend a lot of money, enticing employees to steal that data. Access are very much needed on this platform. Of course, shutting down an entire account from all users isn’t much better than giving everyone access. Which action would you take?
AWS CLOUD SERVICE
This company doesn’t currently have an outage that we know of. However, we thought this would be a great opportunity to share with our members that no company professes 100% up time. It simply does not exist. Imagine how long .1 of a year is. Imagine that event coinciding with your advertising campaign or other important business function.
We once did an audit on a customer who had a redundant system which failed over from AWS. We asked the company why they would implement a system that leaves AWS, a company where many Hyper Availability systems are built. The answer from the company was that AWS could not provide 100% up time. They spent $ millions of USD per month on advertising and the idea of their servers ever going down was unacceptable. This logic makes sense and is incorporated into any real Disaster Recovery plan. Your recovery cannot depend on the system that just failed.
HYPER AVAILABILITY
Today, companies need to be online 24/7/365. To do this, they employ new technologies which monitor their network and spool up new servers when necessary. This is a popular solution build on systems like AWS Cloud. These platforms have very real use and can help you to realize your goals of a stable platform
Hyper Availability refers to a solution which tries to automatically mitigate and if necessary recover from outages in your server infrastructure. So in short, the idea is to keep your website accessible for as long as possible. If you don’t have the money to hire a team and hardware, a cloud our SAAS solution may be your only solution. The key is to understand their limitations and the importance of diversifying as your operations scale
CONCLUSION
Today it was a Salesforce outage. Tomorrow it will be the next major corporation. Computers are inherently volatile. Could you do better on your own? Probably not. Does that excuse these companies from taking your money yet not delivering the service your company needs? Definitely not. However, knowledge is important. Now you know to plan for these types of interruptions in your business. Do you have a recovery plan for when your enterprise solution provider becomes non responsive? Let us know in the comments
