Technology havoc

Ever considered security to incorporate application uptime? Or do you just consider any downtime of your applications as a break for you? Time for your cup of coffee?

 When you consider enterprise wide application like banking applications, CRM, ERP, or look at controlling applications for your SCADA or CNC machine, it is easy to spot the cost and risk. But what about other applications - perhaps only used occasionally? Or by a small group of users only?

 If you only use your computer to write letters and check your email, you experience this when you do not find letters you wrote earlier, and when you are not able to check you email. Usually, you just call IT-support and gives it no more thought.  Perhaps you should give it some thoughts next time it happens?

Just take the time spent (10 minutes perhaps?),  multiply by the times it happens each year (12 - once a month?), and adjust for the hourly cost (insert relevant number here). For you - the result is 2xrelevant number above (10x12=120 minutes, divided by 60mins per hours = 2 hours).

Obviously, you need to adjust all the numbers above.

Then, you take the number you got and multiply by numbers of employees in your company. The number that shows up is usually quite stunning.

The reason I bring this topic to your mind is the very fact that I myself experienced a down-time in a service. The service is a Cron-service, running to automatically publish blog posts on my blog (yes, I just blew my cover... - I do plan ahead, and I do prepare some posts perhaps weeks ahead - I do it in order to have at least some posts arriving even when I am traveling).

The Cron what? It is a special services running on servers using *nix OS. The purpose of it is simply to schedule tasks so that a human do not have to do all the tasks the computer can do just as well by itself. Usually, such tasks runs and runs and runs and runs. So I tend to forget it being there at all. 

So when the server itself decides to fall over and die (yes, these things do happen - and usually at the most inconvenient of times too). Luckily, the dying of this particular server did not affect me nor my business. Or so I thought.

It took me one week (yes, yes, yes, I know...) to realize no posts arrived at my blog, and then I needed a few more hours to remember that the Cron job I run to run the update script on my blog was on the particular server that went to Computer Heaven last week.

Thus - today you get the weekend laugh that was supposed to be yours last Friday.

On the upside - I got to write this post :)

The moral is simple - computers are not reliable. Make sure you prepare yourself and your company for downtime. And have a plan to get back up.

As always - feel free to share your experiences :)