Mimecast Outage “Cloud Kettle Calling The Pot Black”
UK based cloud continuity and security vendor Mimecast today suffered what is looking like from many customers tweets an outrage of over 5 hours effecting customers email flow.
Customers appear to have 1st noticed the issue at 11am UK time when news appeared that customers inbound and outbound email had come to a halt.
The real issue here is that Mimecast positions themselves as a business continuity provider, a cloud system that protects customers from email outages. Whilst they filter email and provide archiving their key differentiator been delivering continuity to ensure always on email delivery to users no matter what and underpinned by a 100% SLA!
Customers have unsurprisingly taken to twitter throughout the day and reported the woes of pain felt and the promised quick fixes that didn’t come. Cloud invariably delivers high availability and resilience for clients and a consistent more successful outcome than building it yourself on network. Across the industry cloud has improved the reliability of IT, however occasional blips like this do tent to reflect badly on the cloud industry as a whole, worrying customers and putting the negative above all the good that cloud delivers.
Mimecast has a strong record of service delivery over many years, but unfortunately their customers will quickly only remember the pain of today, emphasized further from being sold on using Mimecast to gain assured email continuity.
What may really hurt Mimecast is they proudly promote a great deal of large legal firms relying on their service, with users being lawyers who demand always on email that they rely on for critical matters. I wonder were any court proceedings effected today by lawyers not getting information they needed when it was required and what the knock on implications and discussions ensuing from this with the their IT departments will be over the next few days?
Mimecast has already to their due posted an open service update for customers and promised a more detailed follow up from their CEO later today. In the instance of an issue responsiveness and openness with clients is key to mitigate the bad feeling that rapidly spreads in these days of open social media.
Unfortunately for Mimecast they have made a strong rod for their own back in very public touting of their 100% SLA which customers are touting thick and fast on Twitter.
There will be more cloud stories like this invariably as the world is not perfect, whether you have on network IT or in the cloud. What we do need though is more of the positive stories reported of “I have used my cloud service for 2 years now without any issues or outage” boring to read, but validating what it is all about. The negative stories are always more interesting and certainly create more impact, but cloud does far more good than bad and has changed our expectations and the flexibility we get from IT in our lives at a price all can afford.
Guest Article By Ian Moyse,
Sales Director, Cloud CRM Vendor Workbooks
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