Was the Blackberry outage last week a wake up call for non IT Executives that have become used to systems that appear to be totally on and feel like a utility?
The truth is that the past three years have seen increasing pressure on IT budgets and increasingly internal teams and MSP’s like Twin Systems are patching together infrastructure elements that are starting to age. We all are truly doing more with less – the holy grail for clients selecting a service supplier.

But specifically what happened to the Blackberry network last week? In a nutshell it exposed the differences between the way Blackberry devices handle messaging and their competitors namely Apple or Android devices.

It would be technically impossible for all Android phones or iPhones to experience a global four-day outage like the one BlackBerry saw this week, according to mobile communications experts. Why? The answer is in the technical details of how Research in Motion the company that makes BlackBerry smartphones handles it’s messaging traffic.

The gist of it is RIM acts as a middleman for all e-mail and BlackBerry text messages. It picks up messages from the wireless carrier and passes them on to the recipient. It’s this BlackBerry baton-passing system that went down on Monday last week, killing or slowing e-mail and texting services for millions of people in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The degradation lasted four days.

“It’s because of the way RIM has set up the (network) architecture that is the downfall when it comes to these types of outages,” said Sean Armstrong, who manages wireless communications at a large tech company. “When it’s working fine, it’s a great system. When it’s not working fine, it’s a failure.” On social media sites, some BlackBerry users said they were so upset about the outage — the largest in the company’s history — that they were switching to Apple iOS and Google Android devices. And customer satisfaction with BlackBerry already was low.
This is not to say that Androids and iPhones never experience network outages. But they wouldn’t be global. And they would be the responsibility of a particular wireless carrier Vodaphone, Orange 3 or O2 or a particular messaging system, like Gmail, Hotmail or iMessage, Apple’s new in-house messaging service. Not the maker of the phone.
That makes their problems inherently more localized. “All the stuff goes through them for some form or fashion,” Nan Palmero, a writer for the site BlackBerryCool.com, said of the way BlackBerry handles messages and e-mail. That makes it possible, he said, for the global BlackBerry network to crash, which wouldn’t be the case for iPhones or Androids.
However as with many technology strategy issues it is not clear cut.

RIM, however, takes issue with this analysis. “I would not characterize that as fair,” RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said at a Thursday news conference. “We run a global, secure-push environment that provides the kind of instant messaging that’s made BlackBerry so compelling and so valuableRIM filters e-mails and BlackBerry messages through its own server farms (giant warehouses full of computers) for security reasons. The company scrambles messages, making them more difficult to intercept. That’s won BlackBerry big fans in the business world”
He went on to say “The process for checking your e-mail with a BlackBerry is done by the RIM servers so RIM is going to handle all the heavy lifting of going to your inbox and looking for new e-mail, and if it finds new e-mail, it’s going to push it back your devices.”
Taking a step back and looking at the outage and its impact perhaps raises bigger questions the number one of which is the plans millions of users had for minimising the impact that this would have on their ability to work. Certainly in the UK the Television news and Radio phone in’s were full of people saying they would be losing business as a result of the outage.

In reality if your business is that dependent on the receipt of messages 24×7 (I have to say here at Twin we are a little sceptical….) then you have to have a strategy that allows for systems to failover to another service. This could be as simple as ensuring you have a webmail address that your clients can send mail to and you can pick up from any web browser.

On a larger corporate level it would be worth reviewing the Smartphone strategy you deploy and ensure that you have a business resilience plan to take into account this type of outage.

In summary perhaps it’s a wakeup call to all users of technology that in spite of the hype, technology is complex and not a utility like electricity or water. It’s complexity demands respect and a thoughtful approach when considering strategies to ensure your business is competitive in today’s world.

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