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Microsoft Azure Outage Across the Globe
hawkinspeter writes: The BBC reports that overnight an outage of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform took down many third-party sites that rely on it, in addition to disrupting Microsoft's own products. Office 365 and Xbox Live services were affected.
This happened at a particularly inopportune time, as Microsoft has recently been pushing its Azure services in an effort to catch up with other providers such as Amazon, IBM, and Google. Just a couple of hours previously, Microsoft had screened an Azure advert in the UK during the Scotland v. England soccer match." (Most services are back online. As of this writing, Application Insights is still struggling, and Europe is having problems with hosted VMs.)
This happened at a particularly inopportune time, as Microsoft has recently been pushing its Azure services in an effort to catch up with other providers such as Amazon, IBM, and Google. Just a couple of hours previously, Microsoft had screened an Azure advert in the UK during the Scotland v. England soccer match." (Most services are back online. As of this writing, Application Insights is still struggling, and Europe is having problems with hosted VMs.)
I installed it last night on all domain controllers after testing it in my isolated testing network. It's not really optional since it allows any domain user to become domain admin and the only resolution to that is a domain rebuild or authoritative restore. It's also already been seen in attacks in the wild so you can assume the next client to get driveby malware will be going for domain admin.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'd like to take your question "Is it really a good trade off?" and toss out an example set of numbers to summarize it. Let's say there are 250 business days in a year. Operations run from 8am until 6pm, not counting after-hours processing and maintenance. Revenue is $100 million. Gross profit percentage is 20%. This gives per hour revenue of $40,000, per hour profit is $8,000. A day of lost revenue is $400,000, or a loss of $80,000 of profit opportunity (assuming that opportunity costs are not recoverable). My own calculations for my department are somewhat similar, except I've also included the additional benefit my employees bring in for the work they do when they aren't working on maintaining/improving uptime. Avoiding the cloud is almost a no-brainer in our circumstances, except for very specific & limited services.