I seem to spend a lot of time blogging about cloud services and I think you all know by now I’m not a big fan. So when they fail, I like to gloat. Like I’m gloating at Microsoft right now. Their BPOS system has been slowly failing over the last few weeks and finally gave in the ghost last Tuesday. In fits and coughs.
All BPOS users worldwide were kicked out of their hosted Exchange systems with the following cause being floated by Dave Thomson ( VP Microsoft online services ):
malformed email traffic in the Exchange servers
Huh? What? Dang …. I’ve got a little malformed traffic gumming up the works 👿
While there have been a lot of apologies, I wonder what those who’ve put their company’s trust in Microsoft have to say about not being able to do business properly. Well wonder no more …
Here is a sample:
Kevin Baker posted that he had migrated his company to Exchange Online from in-house Exchange 2003 last October. Now he’s wishing he hadn’t. “I’m sorry to say that I regret everything I ever said about how this would be better. It has been far worse in terms of both performance and reliability. I hate to be so harsh, but I am deeply frustrated,” he wrote.
“Email is the one thing that everyone from the guys in the factory up the CEO uses,” he continued. “The c-suite execs hardly use anything BUT email. It has a bigger impact on IT’s reputation with end-users and business leaders than anything else, and these constant service outages and ‘impairments’ have got all of us in IT panicked. We’re actively looking at migration paths back to in-house email.”
This isn’t the example Microsoft was hoping to set especially seeing as it’s been pushing BPOS/Office365 very hard. Even Google has been struggling with this: it’s Blogger service was recently down for almost a week. The problem is that cloud services are hard to get right. Many of us have been struggling to do non-stop, 100% available services for many years but there’s no guarantee it will work. The way you want it to.
So I reiterate – don’t use cloud services for critical services!