You’re home sleeping, as are all your people. Something goes awry with your business-critical application running on Azure. Take a tour with us of all the things that happen next, including how you’re prepared to get operations started again in the morning.
Author: Howard M. Cohen
Good for you! You finally took that tropical vacation during a brutally cold winter at home. You’re relaxing in the warm sunshine while your neighbors are digging out of the snow at home.
What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You
What you don’t know is that your home heating system has had a problem. As a result, the water in the pipes running throughout your home has frozen, cracking those pipes in many places. Next, the weather warms and the ice in your pipes melts back to water, which seeps out of the cracks in the pipes and floods your home, ruining most everything.
A few days later you return home tired from the long flight back, open your door and something smells really bad… your nightmare has just begun.
Here’s the Virtual Version
This version of the story doesn’t wait for vacations. It can potentially happen each and every day.
The workday ends. You and your staff go home for the evening. Gratifyingly, your business-critical applications including day-end routines, eCommerce, and others, keep running reliably on Azure and, frankly, you don’t even think about them anymore. You just go home and enjoy your family.
Then it happens.
It could be any one of a number of things. A carrier circuit fails. Something in the code of your application goes awry. A cybercriminal mounts a brand-new attack in an effort to bring down your eCommerce site. Any of a number of things can fail at any moment in time.
You may be eating dinner or watching television. Catching up on work you didn’t get done during the day. Perhaps you’re already asleep. Meanwhile, your eCommerce site may cease bringing in business on the other side of the world. Your key business data may be downloading to a criminal’s computer after which you’ll see a ransom note. More simply, reports you’re expecting to have in the morning have stopped processing. Any of these or many others are preparing to give you your first headache of the morning.
Who’s Minding the Store?
Many will say that “Azure” is minding the store. But “Azure” doesn’t have access to, contact with, or provisions to handle many of the elements of the entire network between you and the cloud services. Unless you’ve configured them, many of the safeguards available from Azure may not be activated.
This question becomes foremost in your mind when you arrive at the office in the morning and find members of your staff panicking because they can’t get into the system, or didn’t get the reports they were expecting, or they simply cannot log into the network. Here again, something smells bad.
The rest of your day, perhaps even the rest of the week, is consumed by working to recover from the disaster caused by the overnight outage.
And the question lingers; How could this happen? And who IS minding the store?
And how are you ever going to enjoy a night’s sleep ever again worrying about things like this happening?
What Should Have Happened!
Pick a problem. The cybercriminal is the likeliest. An attack commences. Something or someone should have detected the beginning of that attack. Then, the nature of the attack should be evaluated, compared against other known threats, and a remediation strategy formulated. Then, that remediation should commence immediately.
Depending upon the criticality of the systems impacted, somebody may need to be notified of the event. If resolution is not possible without the involvement of your personnel, you should be alerted to that instantly. If it’s a simple problem readily resolved, it should be reported in an upcoming activity summary.
Some problems may be handled through automated safeguards. Others may require the involvement of human experts, or a combination of the two. All of this should happen without your intervention.
Budget Implications
You may now be wondering how much it will cost you to implement all that automation and hire all those experts, and the good news here is that you’re wasting your own time worrying about it. There’s an easier way.
You need the Idenxt SleepWell SLA!
Idenxt was created by experts with long histories in the Azure space to provide exactly the kind of oversight and action described herein. Idenxt automation detects the problems, works with Idenxt experts to identify, evaluate, and formulate solutions. It then executes that remediation to stop problems in their tracks.
You hire nobody. You purchase no hardware or software. You simply subscribe to a services that saves you harmless and lets you sleep soundly knowing you won’t encounter nasty surprises when you return to the office in the morning.
That’s the Idenxt SleepWell SLA! To learn more about how to put it to work for you, contact us here.