Lessons for business from GoDaddy outage

12 Sep 2012

Angela Ashenden, analyst at MWD Advisors, explains the risks of experimenting with new collaborative SaaS tools.

Executives at web hosting company GoDaddy have admitted that it wasn’t a hack or a denial of service attack that took the company’s infrastructure down for several hours on Monday, but a “series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”

Whatever its cause, the outage reportedly took millions of sites down and cost customers dearly. While many of these are small US-based ecommerce sites, others are software-as-a-service providers supplying business tools, among them social task management vendor Asana, which has confirmed that this will accelerate its pre-existing plans to switch to a more reliable provider.

The incident should stand as a salutary warning to companies chasing the cost benefits of SaaS tools, without due attention to business risk, says Angela Ashenden of IT advisory firm MWD Advisors.

“As an emerging player, and like many small, innovative SaaS companies in the same position, Asana offers its services for business use free of charge for up to 30 users, with subscription-based pricing available for larger teams,” she says. “But while this is clearly targeted at business use, again like many others in its position, there is not service level agreement (SLA) in place.” According to Ashenden, Asana tells its customers that the services is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis and takes no liability for any loss of data which may occur in a service outage, such as the one it experienced with the GoDaddy outage.

“I don’t say this to knock Asana; I understand the importance in developing the service through allowing people to use it and gaining feedback on what works and what doesn’t, plus of course the company needs to gain profile and credibility before it can generate the funds to take a more strategic business-oriented direction, for example,” she says.

She also acknowledges the value of these type of tools from a business user’s standpoint. “One of the best ways to get a handle on your requirements when it comes to collaboration software is to try out some tools to see what sticks.”

But, she adds, businesses need to be aware for the potential of these types of services experiencing outages or even going bust. “If you can’t get your data out, then you have to be confident that there is no business critical – or even just important – information being stored there.” Pilots and requirements exploration are one thing, she says, but if you want to use a cloud service as a long-term, strategic business tool, “you have to demand the appropriate levels of service guarantee and data security.”

Her advice? “Don’t get caught up in the convenience and forget the business implications. They bite pretty hard.”

Meanwhile, executives at GoDaddy have assured customers that it won’t happen again. “Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again. At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.”

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