BrightCloud Customers Connected in Major Outage
October 4th, 2011 by BrightCloud
BT suffers huge broadband failure across UK
Whenever we talk about moving IT services off-site many organisations worry that this will lead to over-reliance on their networking and their networking is vulnerable. Looking at the risks of hosting your own IT on your premises and comparing them against the risks of hosting in a secure data centre, such as any of the data centres BrightCloud uses, it becomes evident very quickly that there are many more risks inherent in hosting your own IT systems on-site.
The one risk you run really is a lack of connectivity, and so it’s interesting that the country has just experienced a major broadband outage and yet the majority of our customers have remained connected.
Every customer that uses cloud computing has a leased line connection from all their important sites, smaller sites are often connected through broadband however the risks are clearly understood. BrightCloud would never let a head office connect to the cloud through broadband, and yesterday’s major outage backs up that advice.
What do you do when the broadband goes down? Well as I said, firstly most important offices are connected through leased line, and with NHS customers they connect direct through N3. Homeworkers have routers installed which can connect to the 3G network if their broadband suffers an outage, and yesterday there were several success stories of customers not even realising the broadband had gone down.
One of my favourite stories is that one of the senior members of staff who lost their broadband connection simply picked up the iPad and connected to their mission-critical applications by their iPad’s 3G connection, the applications were all there the data was secure and everything worked brilliantly for the whole day.
It’s true that you do need a network connection in order to gain access to cloud computing, if it’s a completely mission-critical application you would never rely on broadband however if the broadband does fail there are other ways to connect. I’m happy to report that most BrightCloud customers remain connected to their applications and working efficiently, remotely and happily while a major network outage affected the country.
Should you want to discuss this or any other security matter then call us for an informal chat or book your free 90 minute consultation on 0870 770 9725.
