As IT systems gradually extend their reach from the business to the home and vehicles, even temporary glitches have a wider effect. Example: A (minor, but noted) outage of Nest
Nest, the company producing innovative thermostats which let users control the temparature at home remotely, experienced a temporary outage. Users where not able to reach the system nor could they control the temperature in their homes for a brief period. Same for Dropcams, which are dependent on a Nest account.
What an outage is might be re-defined
Today, outages affect mainly businesses. This (little) incident though provides a glimpse that as we are preparing for the connected home and car, such incidents might extend to other areas of life in the future.
One way to avoid this would be to use systems which are independent from each other. If the water supply fails, it should not affect heating and vice versa. But things are not that simple anymore: The web, mobile apps, platforms for registration such as Twitter, Google or Facebook which are often used to onboard users more quickly, are all layers in such systems. If one of the components fails, this might have effects far wider than today.
What an outage is, how high the perceived and real damage is, might therefore be re-defined in the future. One challenge here is that preparation to avoid lengthy problems and outages is not that easy. Often external systems are deeply tied into new networks such as home automation or in-car information systems.
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