Digital Society Depends On Robust Digital Infrastructure

So much became clear yesterday when a power failure at Easynet’s Schiphol datacenter affected the proper functioning of parts of the traditional, connected and online economy. It took about 1.5 hours before Easynet went public with a tweet and about 11 hours before services were fully restored:

We suffered a power failure in our Schipol DC earlier. Engineers are on site & working to rectify this ASAP. More updates as we have them.

— Easynet (@Easynet) October 1, 2013

Final update: All services fully restored effective as of 21:00. Thank you to those impacted, once again, for your patience. #schipholDC

— Easynet (@Easynet) October 1, 2013

Check out this storify link by Dionar for more social media mentions.

During those 11 hours, four things became abundantly clear:

1. Data centers are the new industrial estates in the digital landscape of the online economy. The outage affected online parking, hotel reservations, ecommerce, communications, and Enterprise back offices to name a few
2. Local outages have nationwide impact. A power outage at Schiphol Amsterdam affected online parking in Venray
3. Digital infrastructure value chain is complex. Many customers had no idea that their digital infrastructure was located at Easynet’s Schiphol datacenter
4. If your digital infrastructure is mission critical you can not afford to be offline. Many customers will take a closer look at the contracts they have signed with their digital infrastructure suppliers and will likely be prepared to pay more for increased reliability.

In an earlier post we introduced the concept of cloud traceability. We said:

A new computing value and supply chain is emerging as deployment models are becoming more elastic. For instance, a BPaaS vendor can take services from a SaaS vendor that is running its infrastructure from another IaaS vendor that has co-located its cloud in another vendor’s datacenter. Just like in food safety where the EU is regulating food traceability (from the farm to the fork), enterprises should track deployment options from the data center to the business process to make sure the value chain is uncompromised.

What about your digital infrastructure deployment models? Have you got cloud traceability? Can you show cloud traceability in your cloud offerings? Let us know!