I was happy to see that during the blackout Office 365 services for WitzEnd Computing and our clients who use Office 365, remained online. However, for some people the nearest cell phone tower was down and their internet was down so they weren’t able to access their new emails or SharePoint files on their phones or wireless mobile devices. My Verizon phone stayed online so I was able to access and respond to emails throughout the power outage. I talked to a few people who continued working through until 7 pm instead of sitting on the freeway. They had Verizon mobile cards and the majority of their data is in the cloud.

I suspect Blackouts in Southern California will be few and far between, so I’m not sure that’s the best reason to move to Office 365, although it’s not a bad reason. I noticed there was a run on Universal Power Supplies the next day. Most companies already have a UPS system for their onsite servers to protect against power sags, outages, surges and to safely shut the server down in the event of an extended outage (longer than 30 minutes). What a UPS can’t protect against is a server that is randomly shutdown and then doesn’t come back online correctly. We had a few that didn’t start correctly the next day, but we were able to get them all back online without issue. IT service providers, like WitzEnd Computing, usually recommend nightly server images, virtual backup images and online backups as a failsafe for an unexpected crash. These are all good ideas and required if you have the liability of an onsite Exchange or file server.

I think a better option, especially for Exchange, is to move your data to Microsoft’s Office 365 geo-redundant data centers. Here is Microsoft’s promise to their clients regarding uptime and security:

• Financially-backed, guaranteed 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Always-up-to-date antivirus and anti-spam solutions to protect email
• Safeguarded data with geo-redundant, enterprise-grade reliability and disaster recovery with multiple datacenters and automatic failovers
• Best-of-breed data centers with SAS 70 and ISO 27001 certification

Even with this guarantee some of you may have heard about recent Office 365 outages. For our clients there were two of them recently. One was on September 8th from 8pm – 11:30pm and another one on August 18th from 11:30am to 2:40pm. After both incidents Microsoft sent us an email describing what happened and explaining that a 25% credit will be added to the next invoice.

We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business. As a gesture of our commitment to ensuring the highest quality service experience Microsoft is proactively providing your organization a credit equal to 25% of your monthly invoice.

Here’s a link to the entire email at Technocliq.

I was willing to chalk the first outage up as “growing pains.” The next outage was disappointing, however my disappointed didn’t last long, when everything came back online and our Exchange data was all there. Both our clients and WitzEnd Computing had some emails sent to us bounce and for that we definitely deserve compensation. Microsoft sent the email about the credit on the same day, 8/18 for the 8/18 loss and on 9/12, after the weekend, for the 9/8 loss. I haven’t received any credits from Cox or SDG&E after the blackout yet.

Microsoft gained my trust by issuing the credit and bringing everything back online without data loss. Even with a few brief outages, I trust my Exchange and SharePoint data in their SAS 70, geo-redundant datacenters more than I believe in the reliability of an onsite Exchange server with a UPS.

Steve Fink
Systems Consultant
WitzEnd Computing