How to prepare for Verizon’s 2-day cloud shutdown

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

With some of Verizon’s enterprise customers about to lose their cloud service for up to two days, now is the time for them to prepare for the extended downtime. "One of the major selling points of cloud computing is that it takes the burden of IT management off the shoulders of the customer, but with this outage, Verizon’s customers are right back in the thick of things when it comes to IT management," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group.

"They’re going to have to figure out how to minimize the impact of the Verizon two-day fail on their business." Verizon confirmed to Computerworld this week that it will shut down its Verizon Cloud service to do maintenance for up to two days, starting at 1 a.m. ET Saturday. Users are being told to shut down their virtual machines at least an hour ahead of time…

That means users of Verizon Cloud – about 10% of the company’s enterprise cloud users – won’t be able to access their cloud-based email, apps or stored data. That’s significant for businesses that increasingly depend on the cloud to keep their systems – and their businesses – running. Users are known to complain about outages that last for minutes or hours…

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