Fri, Jul 3, 2009 15:19 EDT

BREAKING: What can be learned from the authorize.net fire?

Breaking news of a major fire that has reportedly shut down Authorize.net

Topic: Infrastructure

Current Rating: Comments: 0

If you’ve been having trouble buying things online this weekend, you’re not alone.

Thousands of internet merchants had their operations shut down, and many of them are no doubt planning to switch providers after a recent fire that reportedly took out Authorize.net’s main data center.

According to reports, the outage was caused by a sprinkler system that had been triggered by a fire inside the building. Many of the affected servers apparently hadn’t been offline in years.

Given the nature of the industry, it only took a few minutes for Twitter to be swamped with news of the outage.

In fact, the company was quick to act by creating a Twitter account to keep their customers updated on the events in real time. This was a responsible move on their part.

What really surprised me is that a company of this size didn’t have a rapid recovery plan in place. It would’ve been a simple matter to rent a failover system and keep it on standby in case of an event like this.

These days, it's especially easy because there are now many SaaS providers offering all sorts of "High Availability" systems that don’t require any additional maintenance cost or capital investments.

Of course, I’m sure they have backups ready to go, and that very little data was lost. I think the real damage here will be seen in terms of lost market share and a damaged reputation. Right now, there are a lot of upset merchants who are incurring marketing expenses and turning away sales.

I’ve had great experiences purchasing through their service, and I really hope they’re able to recover from this disaster.

About The Author:

Storagepipe Solutions offers business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that range from online backup to email archiving. Visit their web site for more details on how you can protect your business.

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