Microsoft Cloud-based Email Outage

Microsoft is hitting it's growing pains with it's online cloud-based email outage yesterday.  They had a

MAJOR outage yesterday for many hours, most business users losing an entire day of email.  Yikes!  It will be interesting how they respond.  All vendors have outages but the response really is the key for the end use, especially business end users.  The better providers respond well with things like what, why, why not again, what's different, what have we learned, etc...

Here are more details on the outage.

Microsoft fixes Exchange Online outage after almost 9 hours
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
@JuanCPerezIDG
Jun 25, 2014 12:02 AM

Microsoft has finally fixed an Exchange Online outage that left affected users without access to email for almost nine hours on Tuesday, prompting many to vent their frustration online as they struggled to get their work done.

The company hasn’t said how many customers were impacted, but judging by the volume of complaints posted in discussion forums and social media sites, it must have hit a substantial number of users.

Plus, the length of the outage, and the fact that it struck during U.S. work hours, makes it a significant and embarrassing one for Microsoft, which is locked in a fight with Google in the cloud communication and collaboration software market.

Exchange Online is sold as a standalone service, and also as a component of Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud communication and collaboration suite for businesses, schools, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.  Entire article here.

Cisco predicts Global Vidual IP Traffic to grow 3 fold by 2018,reaching 1.6 Zettabytes

Interesting prediction from Cisco on Visual IP data traffic in year 2018 with lots of comparisons to current data traffic.  It's a lot and is of course expected with HD TV, M2M, et al.

The "Internet of things visual" arrives in full force...

Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018
6-10-14

Check out the complete Executive Summary and an excerpt below.

The Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update is part of the comprehensive Cisco VNI Forecast, an ongoing initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applications on global networks. This paper presents some of Cisco’s major global mobile data traffic projections and growth trends.

Executive Summary Excerpt
February 5, 2014

The Mobile Network in 2013

Global mobile data traffic grew 81 percent in 2013. Global mobile data traffic reached 1.5 exabytes per month atthe end of 2013, up from 820 petabytes per month at the end of 2012.

Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly 18 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. One exabyte of traffic traversed the global Internet in 2000, and in 2013 mobile networks carried nearly 18 exabytes of traffic.

Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2012. Mobile video traffic was 53 percent of traffic by the end of 2013.

Over half a billion (526 million) mobile devices and connections were added in 2013. Global mobile devices and connections in 2013 grew to 7 billion, up from 6.5 billion in 2012. Smartphones accounted for 77 percent of that growth, with 406 million net additions in 2013.

Globally, smart devices represented 21 percent of the total mobile devices and connections in 2013, they accounted for 88 percent of the mobile data traffic. In 2013, on an average, a smart device generated 29times more traffic than a non-smart device.

Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2013. Globally, the average mobile network downstream speed in2013 was 1,387 kilobits per second (Kbps), up from 526 Kbps in 2012.

In 2013, a fourth-generation (4G) connection generated 14.5 times more traffic on average than a non‑4Gconnection. Although 4G connections represent only 2.9 percent of mobile connections today, they already account for 30 percent of mobile data traffic.