Expect the unexpected

Found an email in my mailbox today. Apparently Joost they had to move to a new version very quicly. Here’s the story:

As you may know – we use SSL technology to protect your privacy. Once very other year or so these certificates need to be renewed. That moment came, for the first time in our existence, yesterday. Unfortunately we did not realize that we had a copy hardwired into the 0.9.1 client by accident.

Hence this new 0.9.2 build.

It’s an unfrtunate fact of life that things never go to plan. We had an interesting one at work this weekend where an unfortunate series of events triggered an outage that technically should never had happened. But it did. The question is, do you stick your head in the sand and hope it will go away?

The answer, as you expect, is a pretty strong “of course not”. The idea here is to deal with the matter in as efficient a manner as possible, then make sure it never happen again. And a pretty key idea is to make sure your client base is aware of the measures you are putting in place to enure the future of their service.

One extra point here. The measure you put in place doesn’t necessarily have to be technological. Sometimes technology problems can be the way to deal with issues, but sometimes it’s down to policies and procedures too. Having the right people in the right place can be of parmount importance and ensuring they know what corrective action to take is again critical.

Actually, one more point and this is the last one I promise. Sometimes problems can be resolved by throwing technology and processes at them, but sometimes it’s not economically viable to do so. It might be that the gain to be achieved is not proportional to the cost it takes to achieve it. In this case it’s a matter of weighing up the risk of accepting the situation and making sure your customer’s expectations are in line with the service you’re offering.

And always: Expect the unexpected.