Adobe Tarnishes the Public Cloud Again

If anything, TechEd 2014 was frought with messaging around the Public Cloud. Microsoft's keynote announcements were completely focused on a Microsoft-hosted solution, with zero (I repeat, ZERO) love for real IT admins – you know, those that still have day jobs with real issues around on-premises investments. I'll dig more into that in an upcoming commentary. Stay tuned for that because it should prove interesting. (In the interim, read all the TechEd 2014 announcements HERE.)

However, while Microsoft was promoting the "dream" (an actual keynote theme) of the Public Cloud, Adobe was doing its best to thwart trust in an always-on, always-available Public Cloud offering. For many, the outage wasn't that severe, but for those customers who rely on Adobe's own dream (Creative) Cloud, the full 24 hours of outage was frustrating, maddening, and disappointing.

Adobe blames the outage on regular database maintenance tasks, and that's a good start. However, anyone that works with databases knows that it takes a real person to create and scheduled maintenance. So, while the task may have caused the outage, the culprit was a real person.

Adobe was quick to state that the outage was NOT caused by a security breach, which seems to have been the case with a lot of outages recently, but more importantly was the cause of a severe hack in 2013 which affected passwords and emails of over 2.9 million customers. Adobe also stated that the root cause had been identified and that they put standards in place to prevent it from happening again. Note that they didn't say new standards, but just standards. It could just be poorly worded, but if they didn't apply standards in the first place, that's probably the real root cause.

Adobe is now offering a refund for those customers affected by the outage, but only for those customers who A) know about the refund, and B) are willing to apply for compensation; Adobe is trying not to make it easy to obtain the refund. Companies like Microsoft have financially-backed SLAs in place already.