SSP, a global provider of cloud-based back office systems for the insurance industry has announced completion of the migration of its New Zealand broker customers to Australian provider Interactive. The move follows a failure in SSP’s own UK data centre that took SSP’s New Zealand customers, and others off the air for up two weeks.
Last week, North Korea's sole Internet link with the rest of the world went down for about three hours.
The effects of an increasing number of outages of web-based service providers were felt in New Zealand recently when hosted software provider Xero was forced offline for 45 minutes after datacentres at RackSpace, which hosts Xero's data, failed on June 30, causing a 45-minute outage for Xero customers.
The Rackspace incident is far from the only case of a service provider going down in recent months. Based on news reports, the number of such incidents appears to have been increasing lately, analysts say. They cited shutdowns of the Google Apps software hosted by Google, a major outage at PayPal earlier this month and a distributed denial-of-service attack on Twitter, as well as the Rackspace datacentre incident.
In the wake of several service outages in recent weeks, Salesforce.com has created a website to update users of its hosted CRM software on system performance and problems.