Mobile operators would have to tell the public what percentage of their cell sites were working during and after major disasters if the FCC adopts a rule it is proposing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
The proposed rule, announced Thursday and expected to be open for comment within days, is intended to give consumers a way to compare wireless performance in emergencies, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said. The agency also believes it could encourage competition to improve network reliability.
In a press release, the FCC cited Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large areas of the Northeastern U.S. almost a year ago and knocked out cellular service in some areas for days. The storm shut down about 25 percent of all cell sites in the region, and about 50 percent in the worst-hit counties, the agency said.
Not all networks were affected equally, and carriers’ operational choices and practices accounted for much of the difference, according to the FCC. The agency held a series of field hearings on communications services after the storm.
Mobile service is critical during and after emergencies, the agency said, citing information that a majority of emergency 911 calls are now made over cellphones.
Each carrier would have to make daily reports during and after emergencies, for public disclosure, saying what percentage of its cell sites in each county were operational. Operators already submit availability data as part of larger daily reports to the government, but those reports are voluntary and don’t have to be released to the public. Carriers did give daily, general updates to media on their recovery from Sandy, and the FCC used information from operators to provide overall estimates of cell availability.
The new reporting requirements would kick in when the FCC implements its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), which is used in very large disasters and not in every case where a federal disaster is declared, according to the FCC.
Although cyberattacks caused just 6 percent of significant outages of public electronic communications networks and services in the E.U. last year, they affected more people than hardware failure, a much more common factor in service disruptions, according to a report from the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA).
Hardware failure accounted for 38 percent of all incidents and affected over 1.4 million users on average according to an annual incidents report released Tuesday by ENISA. By comparison, incidents that resulted from cyberattacks affected 1.8 million users on average.
Cyberattacks affected primarily Internet access and were the second most common cause for outages of fixed Internet service in particular, accounting for 20 percent of those incidents, ENISA said. They also accounted for around 13 percent of incidents that disrupted mobile Internet service.
The ENISA report compiles data on 79 incidents that occurred across 18 E.U. member states in 2012 and resulted in severe outages of both mobile and fixed telephony and Internet services. ENISA defines fixed Internet and telephony services as those offered through dial-up, DSL, cable, fiber, PSTN, VoIP over DSL and other wired networks.
Providers of electronic communication services are required to report significant network security and integrity breaches to national regulatory agencies, which in turn report them to ENISA and the European Commission. Nine countries did not report any incidents for 2012 and one country hasn’t implemented reporting capabilities yet, ENISA said.
The agency organized incidents into five root cause categories, but also split them by more detailed causes. The root cause categories were system failure, third-party failure, malicious actions, human errors and natural phenomena.
The most common root cause for incidents that resulted in outages was system failure. This accounted for 76 percent of outages and included incidents caused by both hardware and software issues. Most incidents in the system failure category affected switches, including routers and local exchange points, and home location registries, ENISA said.
Third-party failures accounted for 13 percent of incidents, malicious actions accounted for 8 percent, natural phenomena for 6 percent and human errors for 5 percent. Some incidents fell into multiple categories, the agency said.
Incidents caused by natural phenomena—storms, floods, heavy snowfall, earthquakes and other natural disasters—and those caused by human error resulted in the longest outages, 36 hours and 26 hours on average, respectively. However, they affected relatively low numbers of users at 557,000 and 447,000 on average.
Wow. No sooner did I finish writing about how the Google and Microsoft outages were not a reason to lose confidence in the cloud, than Amazon went down. The online retail site—and its associated cloud services—were down for just under half an hour Monday afternoon. I stand by my assertion that the sky is not falling, but there’s more to using the cloud than just availability.
Amazon.com was the third major cloud service to suffer an outage in the last week.
Over on WindowsITPro.com, Paul Thurrott summed up the hysteria over cloud outages nicely. “And of course, the cloud computing doubters—who, like global warming doubters are increasingly at odds with reality—will argue that such outages prove that our move away from on-premises hardware and local storage is nothing but a temporary trend.”Let’s start with some perspective, breaking down the math like I did yesterday for Google and Microsoft. Amazon was down for about 25 minutes (although I’ve seen reports from 15 minutes to 40 minutes). In the grand scheme of things, Amazon was down for an infinitesimally small period of time. Depending on the estimate you go with, Amazon lost about $5 million in retail commerce during that timeframe—or about two percent of what it cost Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to buy the Washington Post, or about two thousandths of a percent of his net worth.
Thurrott also pointed out the irony of how many users turn to Internet-based services like Facebook or Twitter to complain about cloud outages and declare the impending death of this cloud fad.
The debate over cloud availability is silly. As I pointed out my post about the Google and Microsoft outages, local networks and servers are not impervious to outages, so the risk is essentially the same as it pertains to availability.
Security and privacy are more relevant cloud concerns than availability.
There are, however, other concerns that offer a much more valid argument against cloud services for some businesses. Chief among them is security and privacy.
The convenience of outsourcing the IT infrastructure to a cloud-based third-party comes with increased risk that your network traffic or stored data could be compromised in some way, either directly by the IT support personnel charged with maintaining your services, or inadvertently by exposing it to increased risk on Internet-based servers.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. You can enjoy some of the benefits of cloud servers and storage without sacrificing control, or putting the data at increased risk by hosting your own private cloud, or using a hybrid approach that includes on-premise and cloud-based services.
For example, you could store your data locally in an appliance like the ioSafe N2. The NAS (network attached storage) device can hold terabytes of data in a redundant configuration inside a fire proof, flood proof enclosure. Best of all, the N2 connects to the network and to the Internet, and it makes the data available from virtually anywhere, and from any computer or mobile device.
Another option is to choose a hybrid cloud solution like Egnyte. Egnyte does provide cloud file storage, but it can also connect and sync with local storage platforms.
Just keep in mind that this approach has tradeoffs. In order to gain greater security and privacy, you have to take responsibility for managing and maintaining the servers and data, which is arguably one of the biggest benefits of cloud services for small businesses. Also consider the fact that the third-party cloud support personnel might know more than you do about security and privacy, so managing it yourself may give you an illusion of greater security and privacy, while actually putting your servers and data at greater risk.
Tony is principal analyst with the Bradley Strategy Group, providing analysis and insight on tech trends. He is a prolific writer on a range of technology topics, has authored a number of books, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. More by Tony Bradley
The recent outages of Google and Microsoft’s Outlook.com reinforce concerns many businesses have about relying on cloud services and may cause organizations that have already moved or are considering moving to the cloud to reconsider. When you look at the big picture, though, you can still trust the cloud.
It’s no secret at this point that there are a number of benefits to using cloud services. Cloud providers are generally able to take advantage of economies of scale that let them offer servers, storage, and services cheaper on a per user basis than what businesses can accomplish on its own—particularly small and medium businesses that have fewer employees to average the investment across.
Most of the time, we expect search engines, social networks and other forms of web technology to be up and running – but recent events have shown that even big hitters like Apple and Google get it wrong from time to time. Here’s a run-down of some of the most high-profile tech outages this year – you can see more at this handy visual resource.
July 10th – Google
It may have only lasted an hour, but the search giant’s services are now so ubiquitous that the short downtime of Gmail, Google Drive, Google Plus, YouTube, Google Docs and Google Calendar caused huge disruption. Reports of disrupted services began around 9:30am on July 10th and by 10:40 the problems appeared to be fixed – but not before angry users voiced their disapproval on Twitter in droves.
January 31st – Amazon
Again, the popular shopping website’s outage only lasted for around an hour and seemed to be restricted to the website’s home page, but this was enough for web users to start theorising about hacker attacks. According to analysts, the one hour of downtime may have translated to a painful $5 million (£3.2 million) of lost revenue for Amazon.
March 14th – Microsoft Mail
Both Hotmail and Outlook suffered a major loss of service that went on for nearly 16 hours in March, apparently caused by a firmware update that knocked out one of Microsoft’s servers. Mailboxes were up and running again by March 15th. However, the huge number of people who depend on Outlook at work meant the disruption was felt widely.
January 10th – Dropbox
Dropbox, which provides cloud storage for users to access their documents from any device, became the first high-profile casualty of 2013 with a service interruption that lasted for 15 hours. Caused by a synchronisation issue between the client software and servers, the effects of the downtime were exacerbated by the company’s insistence that a fix was just around the corner.
February 28th – Apple iCloud
Apple’s iCloud service suffered eight hours of downtime in February, leaving around 25 million users without access to their mail, contacts, calendar and backups. The iCloud had another outage on April 23rd, which affected sign-on, email, GameCenter and iTunes services, although that time most services were restored within a few hours.
Amazon.com was the third major cloud service to suffer an outage in the last week. 
Security and privacy are more relevant cloud concerns than availability. 
Dropbox, which provides cloud storage for users to access their documents from any device, became the first high-profile casualty of 2013 with a service interruption that lasted for 15 hours. Caused by a synchronisation issue between the client software and servers, the effects of the downtime were exacerbated by the company’s insistence that a fix was just around the corner.