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Age of wise foolishness?

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:43

Jon Honeyball discusses the good, the bad and the outright ugly from the recent mix09 conference.

The bad news

This is all good stuff, but now brace yourself for the bad. Last month, I laid into Microsoft about the business framework for its new hosted services offerings such as Exchange, SharePoint, Navision and the rest, which will become available in the UK by the time you read this. I went through all the available documentation with a hot poker, and found it lacking in the guarantees I'd need. Since then I've had a long conference call with the relevant Microsoft UK people, I had several round-table discussions with senior Microsofties at Mix09, I hooked up with a pile of friends and sources in Las Vegas (both within and without Microsoft) who have a European focus, and talked it through with all of them. Here's the bottom line: if you sign up for these services, whether they be Azure Cloud, hosted Exchange Server or whatever, then your data might well flow out of the Dublin datacenter and wind up in the Oregon datacenter, or worse still, the datacenter in Singapore.

This matters because you, as a UK company director, are responsible under our data protection laws for this data and its location. This doesn't seem to matter much if it's moved around within the EU, but it really matters when it's moved outside the EU. I'm not a lawyer, but I've already got Microsoft agreeing that if your Exchange Server or Navision installation is taken outside the EU, it will be you who's in the hot water, not Microsoft. That's because Microsoft has slipped a clause into the contract that states you're responsible for your data, and that this responsibility cannot be abrogated and made to devolve back onto Microsoft. And this legal framework for this contract remains resolutely in US law. Period. End of discussion.

I've raised merry hell about this extra-territoriality issue and basically just hit a brick wall within Microsoft. I talked to the UK people before going to Mix09 and haven't had any updates for over a fortnight now. On the issue of where your data will be held, I have no choice but to state the following: if you sign up for these services under these terms, you need your head examined. Of course, there are competitors in this space, and some of them might well offer a service that's even worse. But even if Microsoft's offering proves to be the best of the bunch, that would be the best of a very miserable bunch indeed.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Take a look at the SLA (service level agreement) for these services - Microsoft will refund you that month's fees if it can't meet a 99.9% uptime target. On a typical month that amounts to just three quarters of an hour, which might sound pretty good. However, let's say your hosted Exchange Server goes down and the 45-minute SLA window sails past. At this point Microsoft owes you one month's fees, but there are no other hurdles or hard barriers it has to meet. That's all you get. Let's say that your Exchange Server stays down for four days because there was disk corruption, your store is a bit mangled and needs fixing. Who's going to rush around ensuring that your line-of-business application is brought back up to speed as quickly as possible? If you hosted your Exchange Server yourself, or even put it in a rack in a UK-based hosting centre, then you could make sure someone is there at 3am to perform a full system recovery. You could plug in new hardware, do reinstalls, use low-level tools to get your application back up and running. But if you're wholly disconnected from your data because it's stored "somewhere in the Cloud", then you're toast. In the case of a considerable outage, your data might be stuck somewhere in a very long queue waiting for attention.