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5 Lessons The Delta Outage Should Teach Us About Datacenter Security And Disaster Prevention

by Greg Pierce
Chief Cloud Officer, Concerto,

The Delta outage: 650 cancelled flights, more than 1200 delayed flights, thousands of frustrated customers, tens of millions of dollars in damages - plus untold reputational damage to one of the world's most trusted airlines. All due to a catastrophic, cascading technical failure that apparently started with a "small fire" in Delta's datacenter.

Multiple news outlets have relayed this story about the fire, so I can't speak to how Delta has its IT network designed and deployed. But I can say three things for sure.

First, our hearts go out to Delta for having to go through the mother of all business disruptions. It's a tribute to the organization's leadership, tenacity and resourcefulness that just a few days later, they were back online and operating normally again.

Second, if what I'm reading is true, this entire mess may have been avoidable - or at least, more easily contained.

Third, I was one of the Delta travellers last week that was inconvenienced by the outage.  It wasn't fun.

Since our inception in 2011, we've been promoting cloud services as a means to decrease an organization's risk. Much of the current cloud conversation is around cybersecurity and how, in our datacenters, we deploy state-of-the-art security measures by employing world-class security experts who have a command of best practices, the digital threat landscape and compliance standards.

But what we-and I dare say other cloud service providers-do not talk about nearly as often is disaster prevention. The term disaster prevention goes beyond disaster recovery (DR) and data backups, and yet most companies aren't prepared for the unexpected.  We consider high availability in multiple datacenters to be "table stakes" in the modern cloud/infrastructure world.  This ...

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About Greg Pierce

A 20-year technology consultant, Greg Pierce is considered one of the foremost experts on cloud computing trends, systems integration and deployment strategies. Greg develops the strategic direction, vision and product offerings for Concerto and manages sales, service and delivery for all customers.

Greg specializes in helping businesses understand, select and deploy innovative cloud solutions that leverage on-premise, hosted, third party and hybrid models. He was influential in the formation of Concerto Cloud Services and its virtual private cloud infrastructure, and under his leadership, Concerto has become one of the leading cloud services providers in the country, including recognition from Microsoft as the U.S. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) of the Year for Cloud Solutions.

Prior to founding Concerto, Greg held management positions in Tribridge's Cloud, Security and Infrastructure, and Managed Services practices. Before joining Tribridge in 2008, Greg owned and operated two companies that provided a variety of IT managed services and cloud computing solutions for customers throughout the U.S., including platforms for the delivery of ERP and other core business applications via private cloud since 2004. He has also served as a CIO.

Greg is an avid speaker for Fortune 500 enterprises, industry conferences and user groups. He serves on the Advisory Board for the University of South Florida (USF) College of Business, the Advisory Board for USF's Executive MBA Program and on the Executive Advisory Council at the Donald R. Tapia School of Business at Saint Leo University. He is a member of Microsoft's Infrastructure Partners Advisory Council and that organization's Cloud Economics Subcommittee. He holds an MBA from USF and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Eckerd College.

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