I don’t typically cover breaches.. yet this one is getting much buzz within the IT services community.
Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange services have been taken offline by a “security incident,” per the company’s incident report. “On Friday, Dec 2, 2022, we became aware of an issue impacting our Hosted Exchange environment. We proactively powered down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while we triaged to understand the extent and the severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident.”
Rackspace has offered impacted customers free access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 for the duration of the incident and shared instructions on how to get that up and running. The instructions suggest the work to get it running will take 30 minutes to an hour.
I wanted to talk about this because of the buzz – I saw the usual noise about this questioning “the cloud.” No, this isn’t the cloud; this is simply continuity planning.
Like car crashes and plane crashes, there are on-prem and in-the-cloud incidents. And like plane crashes, cloud ones get more coverage. They aren’t different.
A business needs to have a plan for downtime in either on-prem or cloud systems. Period. That’s the story.