Internet Resiliance

[Paul Norman]

This thread is prompted by some comments on another topic, elsewhere on this forum. I thought it was very important, enough to get its own mention!

It often comes up in terms of cloud computer services, and is relevant here. But it is not just in that regard. Customers expect you to get their emails promptly, E-commerce retailers need to be in constant contact with their website, orders and stock information.

And technology companies, providing support to customers, well, we get flustered if the net goes down for 30 seconds.

For this reason, our office has three ways of getting on line. This level of resiliance is vital to maintain our business. When land line based broadband goes down, it can take some time to restore!

The dependance on being on line is, I believe, not going to reduce. And the resiliance of service provision for broad band is not brilliant. So we need to be sure we are in touch!

As a self-employed person working alone using my mobile phone as a modem provides enough back up to allow me to keep in touch with email, etc. I use cable broadband, which fortunately is very reliable but when it does go down it tends to be for several hours. I can see why this would cause problems for many people who are more reliant on a speedy connection.

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[Adam H]

We had downtime with our internet provide and still have intermittent phases of down time which can last hours ( living out in the sticks isnt good )

When i does go down setting up the mobile phone as a router gets us through but it really is to purely notify and communicate with clients, as far as anything that needs a bit of graft like FTP uploading it would bring us to a stop because the connection just wouldnt warrant such aggressive usage.

However it does provide the communication we need to at least notify clients of a delay etc.

Dial up i wouldnt even consider as a viable solution mainly because most of our machines dont even have a dial up modem now days so it would be more effort than its worth.

[Mark]

I don't think I'll ever trust cloud services for my critical work (which is most of it!). They may claim to be secure but there's always that one chance your stuff will be lost forever and that's too high a risk to take.

Re connections: I have cable broadband, mobile tethering and no less than two concurrent WiFi dongle contracts - talk about 'connection paranoia'!

When it started it was ASP (Application Service Provision). It then became SaaS (Software as a Service). Now it's the Cloud.

Wonder what they'll try calling it next to get people to trust it.

(Answers on a postcard please.)

[leemason]

Yes, it's all the same stuff just renamed. There is nothing new in IT. Things just get re-hashed and renamed. It's also all driven by fashion. Over the years I've seen:

. Centralised mainframe systems
. The move to departmental servers
. The move to desktop power
. The move back to centralised server based computing
. The move to distributed computing
. The move to remotely hosted applications
. Client server based systems
. Plus lots more.

Everything just swings backwards and forwards dependent on the most recent trends! Once everyone has gone one way someone comes up with a great idea to go back the other way, and so it goes on.

[Paul Norman]

Originally Posted by Mark

I don't think I'll ever trust cloud services for my critical work (which is most of it!). They may claim to be secure but there's always that one chance your stuff will be lost forever and that's too high a risk to take.

Re connections: I have cable broadband, mobile tethering and no less than two concurrent WiFi dongle contracts - talk about 'connection paranoia'!

I am not sure connection paranoia makes you a bad person!

As a technology company we are dependant on connectivity. We need it, all the time.

[Mark]

It's an addiction.

[Vamanoz]

Not sure its relevant to the smaller companies or sole traders but I can offer you a 99.999% SLA on your network connection (basically it will fail once every 75 years).

[leemason]

How do you offer five nines of availability?

[Vamanoz]

Because we own our own 'in the ground' 10gb fibre network and then diversely interconnect through Dark fibre.

[Vamanoz]

In response to Marks comments on never trusting the 'cloud', please remember that BT runs the entire UK defence network (and a couple of others too) and they have never lost a single byte of data in 17 years......how safe do you want the cloud to be?
there will be a time when you have no choice but to you use the cloud for critical data/work as it will be the only safe place to store data. I promise you already your PC's are dormant Zombie's that could be used in a DDOS attack.

[mattjonesits]

On balance for most smaller businesses cloud offers better security and resilience than doing it in house. In my book the flip side is the loss of control. We use Microsoft Office365 and keep getting told when to upgrade!

[thelegalstop]

I am a little bit suspicious about cloud technology. Just grown up without a computer and this virtual reality does not seem proper to me

[Vamanoz]

What makes you suspicious? I am genuinely interested as I get a lot of Large clients with the same opinion....