A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Airport

  

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Every so often you have a real-life experience that perfectly encapsulates a much bigger theme.  Last week was such a week, and theme was cloud computing and the reliability of our nation’s security infrastructure.

It all started when I went to my local airport to board a flight to Chicago.  As usual, I had used my airline’s option to have an electronic boarding pass sent to my mobile phone, rather than using the traditional paper boarding pass. This spares me the trouble of printing one out, and it’s actually a more secure document than its paper equivalent. I win, the environment wins, and the traveling public wins.

The trouble began when I presented my phone to the TSA agent at the security checkpoint.  “Sorry,” he said, “our whole system is down and we can’t scan electronic passes.  You’re going to have to go back and get paper.”  

I had never seen this happen before, so I was a bit surprised and had to ask why.  The TSA agent was very helpful:  “It’s because they upgraded the operating system on the local servers.  It took the whole network down. They’re hoping to have it fixed later today.” 

I got my paper pass easily enough and went back through security, but the thought that a local server upgrade could take down a critical national security function was deeply troubling.  I wondered if the software vendor had done enough testing, or if perhaps the local server environment was just different than what they had tested on.  I wondered if the technicians who installed it had made a mistake, or if the application software just wasn’t compatible with that new operating system patch. 

And, of course, I wondered if this whole unfortunate episode could have been avoided with a cloud solution.  In that case, there would have been no local server that needed upgrading.  There would have been no waiting for technicians to come back and fix the problem.  There would have been no need to roll back to older software.  And there would have been no breach in security.

I made it to Chicago just fine, but only because there was a paper alternative.  Unfortunately, for most security systems, there is no such thing as a paper backup solution.  When local systems fail, bad things happen. 

In the larger discussion about how reliant we’ve become on the cloud and the Internet, this whole traditional systems failure—due to nothing more technically challenging than upgrading an operating system on a local server—is a reminder of just how far the cloud has taken us.

Up, up, and away, friends. 

- Steve Van Till