Nothing Like a Bit of Irony to Pep Me Up

Yesterday mid-afternoon, Broadwick Street, Incisive Media's London-based headquarters, suffered an inexplicable power outage. As it transpired, it was comical: An electrician just so happened to be up a ladder, hovering over my desk, mid-way through replacing a set of fluorescent tubes when suddenly half the floor was plunged into darkness, although as the extent of the outage became clear, the business implications meant it was no laughing matter for long.

The poor electrician was nonplussed to say the least, as he disconnected a seemingly innocuous florescent tube. It took more than a few minutes for everyone to realize that the two incidents ─ the removing of the fluorescent tube and the power failure ─ were unconnected, although the comments by that stage, aimed in jest at the unfortunate electrician, were priceless. By late last night, everything had been restored. Or so we thought.

Shortly after 9.30 this morning the same thing happened, although this time there was no electrician and no ladder. Apparently, according to our CEO Tim Weller, one of the properties adjacent to Incisive Media was the source of the outage, and while Tim gave us an impressively detailed explanation of what exactly the problem was, let's just say it was a technical glitch and leave it at that (I'm not prepared to even attempt to relay Tim's message, given my total ignorance of all things electronic).

Irony
But, as a result of these incidents, a number of things have occurred to me, chief among which is the fact that WatersTechnology has, in the past, reported on various outages suffered by organizations that we cover, analyzing what went wrong and advising how important it is to have effective business continuity measures in place to ensure that any outage isn't overly disruptive. I never thought we'd be picking apart our own operational fallibility, a situation I and a number of fellow workers, find both amusing and ironic.

But on a more serious note, I can't help but think that this is precisely the reason why the cloud makes such a compelling operational and business case for all organizations where information fuels the business. Such were the nature of the outages, that for a lot of workers, heading home was the only feasible option. But even working from home has its limitations in terms of information accessibility ─ a media company's bread and butter. Many of us continue to save key documents on our local hard drives, which, in a situation like this, isn't much use if your PC is sleeping.

Of course, working exclusively on laptops and storing all data on shared, remotely accessible drives is the answer, but surely that's only half the answer.

Half the Answer
Of course, working exclusively on laptops and storing all data on shared, remotely accessible drives is the answer, but surely that's only half the answer. In this day and age, all commercial enterprises should be able to offer its employees remote, 24/7 access to all information that they have been cleared to access, and the most logical, most efficient, and most cost-effective way of delivering that access is via the cloud. I wonder now, in the wake of these outages, how much further Incisive Media's cloud strategy has moved up the IT pecking order?

Thankfully, outages such as the two we've suffered in the past 18 hours are relatively rare, but they can serve an important purpose: They allow us to identify in the cold light of day operational weaknesses that ideally are addressed before the next potential incident occurs.