[AusNOG] After Sandy Knocks Out Power, ... (huffingtonpost.com)

[Mark Newton]

That's all very well and good, but it seems to me that they've just suffered a 100 year storm and they stayed up.

I'm sure you can armchair quarterback 'til the cows come home, but you're basically criticizing a success.

On 02/11/2012, at 6:35 AM, Martin Hepworth <maxsec at gmail.com> wrote:

> That still leaves them with a single data centre, your DR should be in a separate physical location at least 45 miles away

... if you're a bank.  Which they aren't.

Note also that you're talking about DR, but what they've actually demonstrated is HA.  The article already said that they had a DR plan to relocate services to another datacentre; they didn't need to invoke it because they didn't have a disaster, because they stayed up.

If they actually went 100% down, then brought themselves up at another datacentre 6 hours later, you'd be praising them for having a well thought out old-school DR plan, right?

(some enterprises have DR plans which take anything up to a week to execute.  DR != HA.)

> This goes back to old school infosec on risk and costs to business of outages.

Yes, and also the cost of infrastructure.  One doesn't protect one's fruit bowl with a $50,000 safe.

> Problem with alot of the new facilities being build on Saas/cloudy offerings is that theyve grown so fast theyve nit done some of thr basics and rely on luck to get out of problems!

The problem that SaaS/cloud offerings have is that they're reliant on a software substrate that's rarely been tested in true adversity, and therefore rely quite a bit on trust.

When the chips are down, is your cloud provider as good as they say they are?  

  - mark

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