A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Oct 29, 2012

Real Hurricane Forces Virtual Cloud Content Evacuations

The real and the virtual are on a collision course.

The threat of Hurricane Sandy is forcing data managers to check on the security of their systems, especially those housed or run from facilities in the path of the 'superstorm.'

The Cloud (the technologically driven one) was supposed to be safe from earthly concerns. But the various problems with Amazon's web service and the realization that there is a physical component to this challenge is causing information managers across the US - and in other parts of the world - to move their data to centers elsewhere where there may be less threat to their assets - at least by this weather system.

Prudent management mandates that any threat be taken seriously, especially in the wake of a series of natural disasters over the past few years that have reminded those responsible that they can be threatened by events whose existence may not have been seriously considered when the contracts were signed.

One industry that may be particularly vulnerable is education. Thousands of school systems have migrated their systems to The Cloud and are suddenly finding that they are vulnerable, even though they are located thousands of miles from the hurricane's path.

It has been a perennial right of students to greet the announcement of a snow day, in northern climes, or a hurricane day in the southeastern US as a joyous occasion resulting in school closure for reasons of safety and operational practicality.

The wholesale movement to The Cloud, however, may now affect students in disparate regions because of their growing dependence on data stored in or managed from systems located in areas that are under threat. This may result in the anomaly of classes in North Dakota getting a hurricane-induced vacation day - and vice versa for those in Florida receiving one due to snow.

One senses that as the potential impact of extreme weather becomes more apparent, these issues will be dealt with in the planning stages. But for now, it appears that those who recognize the threat and are dealing with it have provided an important early warning reminder to the rest of the industry. JL

Russ at Software Architecture Symposiums International and Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed report:
As last week’s Amazon web service (AWS) outage in the eastern region reminded all of us, the cloud puts a lot of eggs in one basket. Today, that same eastern region is likely to be tossed around in hurricane Sandy. In anticipation, some users of AWS are proactively evacuating to shelters (data centers) on the west coast, packing up their EC2 and EBS and moving far out of the way of the storm. As for storm related school closings, in the past, only the children directly in the path of a storm might get the joy of hearing school is closed for the day, but now ironically, as this blog post below points out, students far away from the storm may experience that joy, as they attempt to log in to their cloud-hosted, virtual class room that happen to be hosted in a data center that was in the path of the storm.

But the good news is that the cloud makes virtual evacuation easier than prior technologies. Anyone that has done disaster recovery planning and practice knows it was just not that easy in the past, and in the case of a real emergency, it never went as practiced.


Will this major weather event provide evidence for the resilience or the fragility of our postsecondary systems, which are increasingly reliant on power and bandwidth to operate?

Does the growth of blended and online learning mean less or more class time lost to weather?

What steps do you take to prepare your students and faculty for weather events such as Sandy, and how has this preparation changed?

While contemplating these questions about weather and the changing nature of higher ed a note from the Instructure Canvas support team crossed my inbox (I'm not a Canvas customer, but I'm trying to keep track of the LMS providers). The e-mail was titled "Planning ahead for Hurricane Sandy".

Part of the text read:

"The East Coast is about to be hit by a major hurricane, called 'Hurricane Sandy.' Meteorologists are predicting that this will have a serious impact in the Northeast and/or Mid-Atlantic regions, which is where Canvas is currently hosted by Amazon Web Services."

"If the storm develops as predicted, we anticipate that at least some portion of AWS will be negatively affected, perhaps even with complete power losses in some data centers. We will be closely monitoring the situation and working around any failures as quickly as possible."

"We are also preparing for the possibility that the entire region becomes unavailable. Per our Disaster Recovery Plan, if it becomes clear that the AWS Eastern region will be down for an extended period, we will move Canvas traffic to data centers on the West Coast."

"We will keep you notified in the event of any disruption to Canvas services."

It is clear to me that Instructure is modeling best practices in communication around the delivery of technology services.

The company sent out a message to customers well ahead of the event warning of a possible service disruption. The company was clear on the specifics of the risks, and the steps that the company is taking to mitigate any potential unplanned downtime. It is clear that the company is on top of the situation, and will be working diligently to minimize the disruption brought on by the weather event. Customers of Canvas can choose how they want to notify students and instructors, and can provide some solid information about why service might be disrupted.

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