How to Over Communicate During a SaaS Outage
When you’re a cloud or SaaS specialist, you can’t hide during an unexpected outage. Instead, the far wiser approach is to over communicate facts with partners and customers. That’s exactly the approach Reflexion Networks has taken this week after experiencing a SAN (storage area network) issue with its hosted email security services. Here are the details.
Reflexion competes in the email security, archiving and eDiscovery and email continuity markets. Generally speaking, the company seems to have a strong track record for reliability. But Reflexion has had two partial outages over the past 24 hours. Instead of going radio silent, VP of Sales and Marketing Scott Barlow has been busy updating partners and customers across Reflexion’s social media sites.
When I asked Barlow for some deeper details via email he replied with these insights:
“Yesterday [May 18], we experienced a problem with our SAN storage infrastructure, making it impossible for us to divert messages into quarantine storage. This in turn caused an extended backup in the delivery of inbound email. The situation was further exacerbated because mail flow didn’t automatically failover to our secondary SAN and backup delivery infrastructure. The outage lasted from 12:00 PM until approximately 4:00 PM EDT. This morning we had another hour outage as we add additional storage to our redundant SAN infrastructure to handle the volume of new customers registering through our partners. No email was lost!
All hands are on deck to conduct a full scale review of our systems and processes to ensure we take the necessary steps to prevent a reoccurrence. We will correct these issues and get back to providing the best service and support in the industry. Our partners want us to get though this, and we will.”
Communicate (But Stick to the Facts)
Of course, outages s*ck. Everyone from Amazon.com to RIM has suffered cloud-related outages in recent months. On the one hand, we all want more reliable SaaS and cloud systems. But if there’s an unexpected setback, you’ll find that the smartest companies over-communicate facts about (A) what went wrong (B) immediate recovery steps and (C) long-term corrective measures.
You’ll notice that Barlow’s email wasn’t filled with speculation or what-ifs. Instead, he shares time information and the most important fact of all: Was any customer data lost during the outage? The answer, in this case, was no.
At one time or another, your company will surely face a business continuity issue. I wonder: Will you respond in a timely manner to customer, partner and media inquiries? Instead of hiding, step up to the microphone armed with facts. Take control of the story and mitigate the risk of media and customer speculation about what went wrong.
I’m heading off to a webcast shortly. But will check in with Barlow tonight for a progress report. But I suspect he’ll have already updated readers across Reflexion’s social networks.
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FB posts and an email to a blogger is over communicating….how about a System Status page on their site? Do we really have to become friends on fb with every vendor to find out the system status?
As a Connectwise hosted email client it also would have been nice if CW had posted something on their forums.
Could have been handled better by both parties.
Ed:
Not sure I agree with you that there IS an over communicating — there isn’t such a thing, in my mind.
The “joy” of social media is that you pick and chose how you want to be communicated with — I think it’s great that they use it, but if you don’t want that avenue of communication, you don’t have to use it.
They’d already planned on launching their own forums, so that avenue is coming. I agree every service provider should be utilizing that.
I think the way Reflexion handled this was quite responsible. I was even on the road and felt like I was getting good information fast enough to handle the issue…. and I certainly don’t want to ever discourage our partners from communicating this much, or as much as possible.
Dave
@Ed: The sole responsibility for the issues encountered and the delays in mail delivery falls squarely on Reflexion’s shoulders. We have resolved all the technical problems and are confident that we have resumed the dependable delivery that is essential for mission-critical email. We realize that we have a lot of work to do to restore the confidence of our partners, and our partners’ customers, and we are determined to provide the kind of sustained performance needed to earn that confidence once again.
Your suggestion of a system status page is excellent. Very shortly we will be launching a status page that will provide our partners with a real-time view of important email delivery metrics. This page has been in the works since before these issues surfaced, and requires a further bit of tweaking, but we will provide the capability soon, as you and other partners have suggested, and will communicate the availability to all of our partners promptly. Recognizing that our partners have different preferences for how they want to receive information, we are also implementing several other communication vehicles, such as the recently introduced forums, from which the system status page will be accessible.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you have any other suggestions, or questions. Everyone here would love to hear new ideas for communicating with all of our partners.
Best,
Scott
Vice President
Reflexion Networks, Inc.
Scott.mspmentor@reflexion.net
Scott,
Down time Sucks. But you Know what? In our industry it happens, the difference between a good company and a great company is how they handle the situation. Over communicate? No such thing.
I am also a firm beleiver in having vendors, employees, trusted advisors and my end clients all on face book. Relationships need to be full circle not just Clients.
Alex
I think the way Reflexion handled this was quite responsible. I was even on the road and felt like I was getting good information fast enough to handle the issue…. and I certainly don’t want to ever discourage our partners from communicating this much, or as much as possible.