Mastering Disaster – NY Velocity Ignite Presentation

Recent web failures, like the highly publicized crash of Obamacare’s website last week, have put unfortunate businesses in the spotlight and the lucky ones on high alert.  Even companies with sterling web availability records, like Google & Yahoo, have fallen victim to often unavoidable, yet very public, outages.  Websites are simply failing more and more these days, and the world is noticing.

So why the trend towards failure?

The web has gotten more complex.  Consumers expect a faster user experience, advertisers expect a personalized user experience, and webs ops teams must deliver both. As a result, operations have deployed various services, tools, and platforms on their sites.  Operations must worry not only about the health of the infrastructure and applications they own and manage, but also of those of their vendors and their vendors’ vendors and so on.  Just one broken component in the delivery chain of a website can take down the entire service.  Increasing your site’s complexity, also increases its fragility.

Failure will happen, companies need to accept it and plan for disaster

To see my recommendations on alleviating and reducing the negative business and branding impacts of web failure, check out the talk posted below from NY Velocity Ignite 2013.

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