Beneficial Intelligence

Robustness

January 15, 2021 Sten Vesterli Season 2 Episode 1
Beneficial Intelligence
Robustness
Show Notes

In this episode of Beneficial Intelligence, I discuss robustness. Robustness is a system's ability to keep running when parts of it are knocked out. This week we saw Parler, a social media platform used by Trump supporters, being taken out by their cloud provider Amazon. They did not have robustness.

The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, has robustness. Governments and big media companies have tried to put them out of business for two decades, and they are still up and running. 

On-premise systems had a certain robustness built in - even if you got into an argument with your database vendor over licensing, your application would continue to run. But if you get into a dispute with a cloud vendor, your system can be terminated at any time. 

As the CIO, you need to take a look at your systems list and determine which systems are the priority systems that are essential for your business to run. Then as your architects to verify that these systems are robust, and ask what it would take to move them to another platform. If you cannot easily take your application and your data elsewhere, you don't have robustness. 

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Beneficial Intelligence is a weekly podcast with stories and pragmatic advice for CIOs and other IT leaders. To get in touch, please contact me at sten@vesterli.com