Living on the edge — lessons learnt from internet outages
Data, and having access to it, has become an integral part of our lives.
Checking our health status on smart watches, gathering data from self-driving cars and drones, using our mobile phone to pay and sending videos over WhatsApp are some examples on how data is generated by us, and stored close to us.
Data is now part of us and living close to us. At the edge of the cloud, as some say.
Bane for consumers
My recent experience when I stopped receiving WhatsApp messages was initially one of living in denial that all of my contacts were busy with other more important things. I think we have been conditioned to be digitally active, so after experiencing a few minutes of digital solitude, I decided to check the web for possible causes of the lack of digital activity.
Turns out there was an outage at Facebook, due to a server configuration change.
What I did during this period of digital quietness was nothing extraordinary. I rechannelled energies into other projects. The state of concentration levels improved ( no more distractions from message prompts ) and there were more ticks against the list of to-do items on my plate.
It was only during the occasional urge to retrieve content that was sticky to Facebook ( for example accessing social groups on Facebook ), or trying to remember what was last committed on previous conversations on WhatsApp that the sense of loss was felt. Not having access to information also created a few “Where were we” moments for me as I tried to recall ideas or what someone had said.
This brought me to a possible postulation - here’s my personal view on the emotional correlation between data generation and data loss ( shown in chart above ).
When more data is being generated, and in faster frequency, we find that our tolerance to the loss of data ( or the ability to access the data ) becomes lower. It appeared that I was going through a FOMO situation, wondering if I had missed anything. Fortunately, the outage didn’t last too long and I was able to shake off the false sense of insecurity that had crept in before it became acute.
Boon for companies
On the other hand - for companies, the cost of acquiring new customers is not low. Banks are offering cash for you to be their client. Free trials for products and services are readily available.
It is during times of trouble, that when companies can meet the needs of a potential customer, that a new customer is gained.
Some of us lose our sense of loyalty and jump ship at the first sign of trouble. During this outage, it was reported that Telegram gained an additional 3 million new sign-ups within 24 hours. Never mind the hassle of having to sign-up a new account or to add new contacts. The process was seamless, thanks to the ubiquity of alternative platforms that are ready to serve the current need.
Customer acquisition for companies has not only become personal and in real-time but the size and scale of the opportunity it represents is huge. Think 3 million new customers within 24 hours. The recent migration to Telegram suggests that the notion of the “need” to connect among digital consumers has now become the new “mission-critical”.
This is one of the reasons why companies continue to invest in ensuring continuous data availability during times of calamity. Solutions such as MetroCluster Business Continuity meets this need by providing up to near-zero failover time ( or recovery time objectives, RTO, in storage jargon ) to ensure the customer experience is never compromised. After all, the investments made to keep the customer loyal will far outweigh future costs in winning him or her back.
Making it better
In most new Web companies ( cloud first, digitally transformed ), the process of revenue generation is continuously being enhanced to incorporate new services that meets the needs of fickle customers. They are the companies who are ready to pounce once when opportunity presents itself. No one can predict an outage but improvements have been made to tighten the lapses. Operations folks that maintain infrastructure such as server configurations have become tightly integrated with application developers, ensuring the reliability of application delivery built on top of services available on the cloud - such as Cloud Data Services from NetApp. Empowering builders of future cloud infrastructure with seamless, easy to consume services will benefit all consumers.
Will we experience another outage like we’ve just experienced? Maybe. But life goes on. We will continue posting photos, chatting and be social animals. With the speed and rich services brought about by the 5G revolution, we are at the cusp of a new experience. New cloud services, intelligent human-like capabilities built into infrastructure and software, plus application and data resiliency may soon make outages a virtual reality.
