Learn from Skype's Difficulties - 23/12/10
Posted by Cloud Net on Thu, Dec 23, 2010 @ 10:16 AM
The internet is awash with talk about Skype’s current difficulty in maintaining it’s service. Many millions of Skype’s customers have been unable to make or receive calls today. Skype have said that this is due to a problem with some super node computers which act as a kind of “telephone directory”.
This is typical of problems that occur in communications – a site or service works perfectly well for a long time and then stops working. At that point all of the good work done and the millions invested become worth nothing.
The fact that the incident makes the front pages proves 2 things:
1) The service is usually very reliable
2) The service is very important to the customer
The customer believes that he is entitled to the service he has paid for and the provider is incapable of providing it, despite his best intentions. The problem is that the supplier will be frantically trying to resolve the problem and restore normal service. They don’t want the breakdown any more than the customer does.
The answer for you as a customer is to give yourself some resilience, if you can. So if it is a phone system, then perhaps it is not sensible to tie up all of your business with a single proprietary provider. Far better to use an open solution such as the one from Cloudnet where if problems occur you have standard hardware which can be plugged into any system. If you can give yourself alternative routes into the internet then so much the better. It’s worthwhile thinking about how the mobiles you already have might fit into the equation.
If it’s data storage system then don’t rely on a single point of presence in the cloud and ensure your data is backed up. It is often too late to think about resilience when the disaster happens to the provider, you simply realise how important that the service was. You are one of millions left screaming at the provider.
Problems will always happen – we are all human – people do things they shouldn’t do – machines break and criminals try and damage everything. In this world getting resilience is something we all should do.
