Jaguar Cars Limited is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of luxury sports saloons and sports car. Land Rover is a world-renowned manufacturer of premium 4x4s based in the United Kingdom. In 2010, Jaguar Land Rover chose Google Apps suite. The licence concern 15.000 seats according to CIO.com.

On Computing.co.uk, we learn that Jeremy Vincent ( Jaguar Land Rover’s chief information officer) said his approach to IT has been changed by learning more about the cloud:

“Six or seven months ago I didn’t know what cloud computing was but I was invited to speak at a conference on it so I thought I had better learn. I did and it fundamentally changed my attitude to IT and I started to preach the gospel wherever I could. I’ve been recruited on a change agenda and needed something to raise my flag”

Jeremy Vincent also gave an interview on Cloudpro.co.uk were he explain how he’s become a fan of cloud. Informationweek explain why the manufacturers of luxury cars chose Google Apps. For Silicon.com, Google Apps helps Jaguar Land Rover to keep monitoring after ford sales.

Company	Country	Service	Application	Critical
Jaguar Land Rover	UK	Google Apps	Email and collaboration	Yes

BBVA is a global group that offers individual and corporate customers a range of financial and non-financial products and services. The banking company inform us on their Pressroom that they will move all staff on GoogleApps. BBC.com reports that it is the biggest deal that the search giant Google has signed with one company for its cloud-computing services, where software is offered as a service via the internet. BBVA will move his staff (110.000 employes) on Google Apps (Gmail, Calendrier, Docs, Google Talk…) for only internal communication.

ZDnet.com precise that the data will not be hosted on dedicated server but on the public cloud. However Google now says that the BBVA deal shows cloud computing is secure enough for financial services. José Olalla, CIO at BBVA said the deal will help workers to remain productive when they are away from the office, helping remote and mobile workers:

“We were looking for a technology that would transform our business operations – not just make our workers more efficient. Integrating the Google Apps for Business suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools.”

Juan Carlos Perrez wrote on ComputerWorld “For Google, the BBVA deal is significant, not only because of the number of end users involved, but also because the customer is a large, multinational bank with strict data compliance, security and regulatory requirements that must be satisfied by the vendors it buys software from.”

Internet users reacted on Twitter. Currently, more than 4 billions of company as BBVA put their trust in Google including Jaguar Land Rover, Priceminister.com, Green Power India, Aperam, SF Bay Pediatrics…

Company	Country	Service	Application	Critical
BBVA	Spain	Google Apps	Email and collaboration	Yes

165.000 website sudently went offline and were offline during one full week, according to ComputerWorld.com. Why all this websites have been offline? A NaviSite Inc. datacenter migration failed and they had to physically move 200 of the 850 servers. Navisite is a provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications and services. NaviSite provides a full suite of managed services, including Application Services, industry-leading Enterprise Hosting, and Managed Cloud Services for enterprises.

NaviSite spokesman Rathin Sinha explained the issue:

As NaviSite tried to solve that problem, the network became overloaded because of all the customers trying to get online. What happened was first the URL could not match with the IP address and then IP did not match with the machine, so it took some time, and all this time we have a highly trafficked overloaded network. If there is one little problem, they multiply because there is a lot of dependencies.”

Customers were really furious about it. On of them, Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics Inc. wrote on a blog post:

According to people who have talked to NaviSite’s tech personnel, they were ill equipped for the relocation and ignorant of how to accomplish even basic tasks. At this point, NaviSite’s poorly planned data center consolidation has slipped from mere incompetence to outrageous indifference to its customers’ needs and should be grounds for legal action, if not government sanctions of some kind.

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2007-11-06	Navisite	7 days	No

CNET.com report that Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) is grappling with a system failure that left the network for its BlackBerry devices unable to handle data services. The outage impacted data services, such as e-mail and mobile Web browsing. BlackBerrys in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa were affected.

Blackberry’s users already experienced massive outage in 2007. RIM said the outage was caused by “a new, noncritical system routine that was designed to provide better optimization of the system’s cache”. About this new outage, HuffingtonPost speaks about “The three-day blackout interrupted email and Internet services for tens of millions of frustrated users”. ZDnet speaks about “Serious outage“.

Users were informed by the Twitter’s feed of T-Mobile UK Support and customers were really angry as we can see on RIM’s Twitter feed.

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2011-10-13	RIM	3 days	No

For about three hours, Cisco website went offline. Netcraft.com report this outage and inform that it was due to human error. Cisco said:

“”The issue occurred during preventative maintenance of one of our data centers when a human error caused an electrical overload on the systems. This caused Cisco.com and other applications to go down. Because of the severity of the overload, the redundancy measures in some of the applications and power systems were impacted as well, though the system did shut down as designed to protect the people and the equipment. As a result, no data were lost and no one was injured. Cisco has plans already in process to add additional redundancies to increase the resilience of these systems”

Netcraft.com also provide performance charts and statistics for Cisco.com on this page.

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2007-08-09	Cisco	3 hours	No

ServerBeach datacenters were affected by a power outage in November in San Antonio. ServerBeach is a dedicated Hosting provider, delivers dedicated servers and server management tools. According to DatacenterKnowledge, the outage occured during system maintenance. The downtime lasted four hours.

ServerBeach communicated on his forum:

We have been performing ongoing maintenance in our Virginia data center since the last issue that we had out there this past summer. At approximately 8:00am Central Time we experienced a power outage that affected our entire data center. At 9:15am Central Time the power stabilized and we began bringing servers back online.

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2007-10-20	ServerBeach	4 hours	No

BGR.com report an T-mobile outage steming from a significant flooding at their central data center in Bothell (State of Washington). This outage affected customer activations and the performance of the Tmobile.com web site.

In fact, the services impacted was customer support, activiations, and some website functions. Lots of customers commented this outage on DSLreports.com forum. The datacenter is located in Bothell:

A blogger, telling that he was a T-Mobile employee, wrote:

The report is correct – The main data center is flooded right now, so we only have email and our coverage/outage map. No accounts can be accessed due to the systems being out, so this can and will affect short codes such as 646, 225, the website and just about every system. It started around 7:30pm EST and was still happening when I left around 2:00 am EST. They were hoping to at least get read only systems online in the next few hours, so that we can at least do a little for the customers. Hopefully it will be back soon – Any techies have a clue how long it takes to dry out servers and get them back online – That should give a better idea on timelines.

Date	Country	Nature	Consequence
2007-12-04	USA	Flood	Servers in T-Mobile data center shut down

BBC News and ZDnet report that an Illinois water system pump was turned on and off repeatedly until it failed. Consequence: the pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes near Springfield was destroyed. The attacks are the latest in a series in which different hackers and groups have targeted so called Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

According to a report from the Illinois Terrorism and Intelligence Fusion Center, cyber attackers broke into a software company’s database and got hold of user names and passwords of various control systems that run water plant computer equipment.

Robert M.Lee wrote on InfosecIsland.com: “The compromise of a US water facility should be concerning for a number of reasons.  Firstly, the idea of anyone or any group (nation state or not) breaking into SCADA and control systems in the US highlights a weakness in our nation’s infrastructure.Experts said that cyber criminals are more and more interested in critical infrastructure.” Same assessment from Dan Goodin on TheRegister.co.uk.

Date	Country	Nature	Consequence
2011-11-21	USA	Terrorism	A pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes was destroy in Springfield

 

Amadeus is a transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, providing transaction processing power and technology solutions to both travel provider.

ZDnet report that Amadeus outages affected Qantas and other carriers, forcing them to check in manually. This outages occurred early in 2010 and in November 2009. In January, Qantas flights had been delayed by up to an hour (FlyAfrica.info forum). In fact, Qantas spokesman Simon Rushton said the system was not working properly between 8.25-9.30am. Major airlines such as British Airways, Air France, South African Airways, Thai Airways, Lufthansa and United Airlines were all affected in the global check-in chaos. We also can see on PassengerSelfService an article about the fact that Amadeus check-in system has more major outages.

Here is in Erding the datacenter of Amadeus:

“While you can get really close, you’re never going to get 100 per cent,” said David V. Jones, the departing chief of Amadeus, claiming that the reliability of its systems and processes was “99.999” per cent. “We have no doubt that in terms of reliability and the quality of our datacentre that we are absolutely world class. That’s just me asserting it but I am pretty confident that our customers would say the same thing,” he added.

 He asserted that Qantas is currently “very happy” with Amadeus and said that he was confident with the company’s reputation and performance.

Edit (30 January 2012): We can read on Amadeus Blog at 5:24 p.m:

Amadeus can confirm that some airlines are experiencing difficulties with our systems. We regret any delay and inconvenience caused and are fully investigating this issue. We will provide a further update on this blog at 6 p.m. CET. (Posted by Stuart Brocklehurst (Group Communications Director, Amadeus IT Group) )

At 7:13 p.m:

The systems recovery continues to progress. We regret any inconvenience and delay this may have caused and will continue to update as the situation evolves.

At 8:15 p.m:

Amadeus can now confirm that all airline systems are restored. Some travel agency customers may continue to experience service disruption which we are investigating. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

At 9:09 a.m:

The systems incident has been fully resolved. All Amadeus systems are now operating normally. Amadeus regrets any inconvenience this incident may have caused.

Amadeus is used by more than 150 airlines (including British Airways, Iberia, Qantas, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, SAS). ComputerWorldUKreports this new outage and confirm that some customers of multiple airlines were unable to book tickets online during 21 hours.

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2010-01-02	Amadeus Check-in	1 hour	No

Date	Service	Duration	Critical Data Lost
2012-01-30	Amadeus Check-in	21 hours	No

The city of San Francisco consolidate seven separate email systems to Microsoft’s hosted cloud-based email service over the next year. As SFGate.com reports, SF city will pay Microsoft more than $1 million per year for the new product.

Jon Walton (San Francisco’s CIO) argue this migration on Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine: “There is some inherent cost in support, hardware, software, and infrastructure to run multiple e-mail systems. It creates a disaster-resilient solution. Nothing that e-mail messages and data would be protected in the event of a disaster in San Francisco. ” It also reduces on site hardware requirements and complexities, and ensures that the system is accessible even in the event of a local disaster – no small consideration in this earthquake-prone region. “That’s extremely important to us, providing government services before, during and after a disaster” Jon Walton said.

One week before the announcement of the migration, customers of Microsoft’s BPOS cloud service, which includes hosted e-mail, experienced 3 outages causing intermittent service interruption for business email customers on the company’s US network. According to Jon Walton on CRN.com,the 300-user Microsoft Exchange Online pilot also demonstrated security and disaster resilience that the city requires, while also meeting the security requirements for San Francisco’s public safety agencies, like the San Francisco Police Department.

The TechNet’s Blog shows that more than 400 government organizations in 48 states put their trust in Microsoft, including for exemple Chicaco, Miami or Baldwin City.

[Image by Tickr on Flickr] You can read the whole news on Microsoft News Center.

Company	Country	Service	Application	Critical
City of San Francisco	USA	Microsoft Exchange Online	Email and collaboration	Yes