BT Internet down for 3 hours today ...

Better today than the 31st!

Seriously, are you saying that you don't use any form of email, internet or electronic communication?  I guess you must be since you posted this.  So an ISP going down doesn't just affect "cloud" users, it affects most businesses.  It is therefore as bad as the electricity going off, but I am not sure that the ISPs have service levels imposed on them by a regulator in the same way that the electricity companies do.

Very frustrating and I hope they compensate you for this!

You could look at dual broadband so if one supplier fails then the other automatically takes over?

Just an idea we sometimes suggest to our clients as even if they are not buying a full hosted desktop solution, it is inevitable that staff are using things like Dropbox, client portals, email, and of course the SA gateway!

3G dongle is another option but can be slow.

Or (and I really don't want to sound like an advert) if you go hosted with us or any other firm then at least staff can go work from home or any other WiFi location. 

Incidentally our preferred "disaster recovery" location is of course any Wetherspoons which offers free WiFi across the UK.

Dan

I can just decide to take a long lunch or have a sleep and catch up later.

A bigger business just needs a back up plan. It must be possible to have a meeting to discuss something or let staff go outside for a couple of hours and contact them when it's back on.

Three hours every few months isn't too big a deal.

Many 'business' class routers now feature dual feed ADSL lines and on top of that the ability to connect a 3G dongle if indeed the wired connection goes down.  Always good to have a backup in the same way if you own a server on premise it's worth investing in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

Late January, with the tax submission deadline looming large and no possibility of staff being able to access.  Quite a bit worse than disaster!!!

Wetherspoons is no use (confidentiality, data protection, security of connection, ...), Also, the working papers can get a bit soggy on the small tables.

Going for a long lunch or meeting etc does not delay 31 January in any way.

Keeping it all in house keeps it smoother - and for those who can suggest that a server can go down (which it can) we have back up servers, tape backup drives, mirror disking and a NAS drive.

Three hours every few months isn't a big deal, in January it is a disaster.

Quite agree - losing internet is not much different from a power failure these days. And nothing will delay the SA deadline.

My Wetherspoons reference was tongue in cheek, but if there was a major issue such as a fire on the business park or snow like last year then at least our staff (and our hosted clients) can work from any WiFi location (home ideally).

Dan

If it's getting near to 31 January and my internet was down I would do what I could which didn't need internet access.

If I had got tax returns ready to submit I would just do something else which helped with meeting deadlines and then submit the tax returns in the queue when the internet access was available.

If I didn't have internet access now I would look at my list of clients who have provided me with data but I still have to work on. I would work on them now and use the internet when I have access.

I am very sympathetic to the view of Old Greying Acc, but with a big, big caveat. 

Some years ago I invested in a friend's IT startup which was intended to develop cloud computing services - before the name even existed in common use. It's been a long story and  if I walked away today I would lose the whole of my investment. Also, I don't even use the cloud in my own business. I just don't like the way the cloud works at the moment for either the customer or the provider. It doesn't surprise me that old Greying Acc looks at the cloud with suspicion.

Here's the caveat. The company I invested in is still going. It now operates as an ISP, it has its own racks in Docklands and the provinces, it sells all sorts of services, it has a growing customer base, and currently it dips in and out of profit from month to month, but is solvent. This isn't a sales pitch so I won't tell you the name of the business. I am now gearing up to work actively with my colleagues in this business to take it to the next stage, and we are working on technologies that will strip out the deficiencies of the cloud and leave it as the undisputed way forward for most businesses. We are not the only people working towards this. For me the key issues are security (physical and software) and fail-safe triple-redundant connectivity. I know a bit about fail-safe system redundancy - I was a pilot for many years and (among other things) I now write safety management systems for railways. 

I will make three predictions. First, the next generation will take hosting for granted and expect everything to be hosted. Second, my own business will be fully hosted as soon as the new systems are ready. Third, the hosting service we (and others) will soon be offering won't be called the cloud, it will have taken the cloud as the starting point but it will be something rather different.

I am typing this beside a pool on Grand Cayman Island where I come each January to stay with my wife's daughter and grandchildren. Each time I arrive I switch on my laptop and within 90 seconds my VPN tunnel is established to my own server via a server which I helped to install myself in the provincial rack of the ISP of which I own a substantial chunk.

Sorry Old Greying Acc, I do agree with you but only for the time being. The times they are a changin'.

The result is not much work can be done when cloud fails.

I use a Three dongle when my usual ISP is down (cost £20 with some data) and the speed is nearly the same as my Virgin Media 10mb. 

Minimum charge PAYG on Three is £10 for 1GB expiring after 1 month, which would last just me about 2 weeks, but of course I only need it while the usual ISP is down. I am a bit mean!

The approach we are taking as software developers is more like the Apple iCloud approach.

Work on your tax returns on your PC at work, carry on your suitably ruggedised ipad down at Wetherspoons, or in a web browser at home of an evening. If you run out of internet you carry on as you always did - working "unconnected".

As for multiple wired suppliers - an "outage" often affects whoever you pay as ISP as they are often utilising BT hardware.

David Forbes

Daveforbes has some of the answer (I said others were working on this same as we are) - there are 3 key elements to making this work:

1. Synchronisation which lets you dip in and out of the cloud if you have to so that the most recent version of the file is always known and always available whenever your connection is live - not as easy as it sounds, we think a bit of AI is needed particularly when multiple users access the same database files

2. Redundant connectivity. I argue for triple redundancy. Also not easy, and at the moment definitely not cheap, but it will come.

3. Other stuff. Proprietary.

Interestingly, if you take the AI approach the distinction between the hosting and the user gradually disappears provided the user has something more than just a dumb terminal. You could have fully distributed processing and file storage where the "physical" location of the file swaps back and forward (or in mutliple directions) from one server to another according to circumstances. All the benefits of the cloud are still there but it becomes even more "cloud-like". That is going to be a bridge too far for Old Greying Acc but it's going to take a while to get there and a while longer before the economics become compelling so depending on how grey he is it may not be him that has to worry about it.