2. Tom Lawrence, Lawrence Technology Systems
The Rackspace outage, which put thousands of email users offline over the weekend due to a cybersecurity event, is a lesson for partners in disaster planning and customer support.
The yet-to-be-disclosed security incident took down Rackspace’s Microsoft Hosted Exchange environments. The cloud services provider early Monday morning announced that it had resorted email services “to thousands” of Microsoft 365 customers, but partners and customers continue to voice their concerns about the vendor’s response to the crisis.
Details remain to be seen about the actual security incident and any security posture from Rackspace that may have led to the problem. However, partners have pointed to systemic failings. This includes Tom Lawrence, who runs the Michigan-based MSP Lawrence Technology Services.
“Just from the standpoint of them not being able to get the systems back up in a reasonable amount of time and running shows there is some type of failure in their disaster recovery process,” said Lawrence.
He made waves when he said that Microsoft’s slowness to respond with a method for patching the issue compounded the problem.
Learn more here about the customer impact.
