BlackOutBerry, Slow Daddy

There have been a few well-publicized Internet outages recently. A damaged cross-Atlantic fiber optic cable had crippled data communications to India. Just this week, the Blackberry outage left millions of business executives without email. Although it did not receive much publicity, Go Daddy's email was taking hours to route for during Monday and Tuesday this week as they upgraded their email servers.

We live in a highly networked and intertwined technology world. One weak link can impact millions instantaneously. The Skype outage late last year was attributed to a large number of Windows machines being rebooted as a Microsoft Windows patch was loading on the engine of Skype (distributed peer network).

Malicious cyber attacks from viruses, spam, and bots can wreak havoc to a business' data services. As well, natural disasters can challenge and overwhelm our communication systems as Hurricane Katrina showed.

So what are we to do knowing that disruption to our mission-critical data services is unavoidable? For a large business, the IT department is tasked with building fault-tolerent systems. For a smaller business without a large IT infrastructure or budget, having backup plans and overlapping vendors can help mitigate a single-point of failure problem. A simple example is that in case voice over IP goes down, a business may want to have a few backup lines from a local telco.

The advances in wireless and Internet technology have provided us with the ability to communicate instanteously via text, email, voice and data. Now that we have become accustomed to this "always on" world, a breakdown in the grid creates mass confusion and frustration. It will be interesting to see what type of fall-out will occur from the Blackberry outage. Although it is unrealistic to expect 100% uptime, customers' tolerance for these outages is low, low, low.