Welcome to part four of our Application Updates blog series. Thus far we’ve covered how expediting updates without proper tooling yields downtime, how traditional approaches to updates can be cumbersome and risky, and ultimately how Cloudpager can instantly modernize your approach to enable rapid and low-risk application updates.
This week I’d like to take another trip down memory lane with a word of caution for my fellow IT folks. This blog will highlight a former colleague of mine executing a poorly timed update and the havoc it wreaked, while juxtaposing that scenario with how Cloudpager operates (read as: can make our lives WAY easier).
Downtime Means Losing Millions of Dollars and Team Members
I was very fortunate to work with a large investment bank early in my career. I was part of an amazing team and still consider it to be the most well-organized IT environment I have experienced. The processes and standards followed were tight and yielded great results, but even so mistakes happen (and happen they did!).
One day, my colleagues on the deployment team received a standard deployment request. The request dictated the deployment be pushed around 1:30pm on a Wednesday. This was a global company so 1:30pm on a Wednesday was not necessarily an oddity since it could be deployed to a group of machines in any region. Unfortunately, the person who submitted the request made a mistake. It should have said 1:30am on a Wednesday. The deployment in question contained multiple MSI packages and required multiple reboots for successful installation. The deployment was scheduled as requested, which included groups with machines in New York. As a result, computers being used by stock market traders rebooted multiple times in the middle of the day disrupting business for more than 30 minutes.
It was an absolute nightmare. Management was furious, claiming the mistake disrupted trading and potentially cost millions of dollars. The poor guy who pushed the software was the scape goat and removed from his position.
Management was furious, claiming the mistake disrupted trading and potentially cost millions of dollars.
Eliminate Disruption by Dynamically Provisioning Application Updates from the Cloud
If we had Cloudpager, we could have containerized all applications including those with multiple pre-requisites. Moreover, when applications are containerized, end users do not need to reboot in order to start leveraging the updated applications. Even if the deployment was executed in the middle of the day, Cloudpager would have dynamically pushed updates to end user desktops almost instantly without significant disruption. This is possible because applications are virtualized on a per-user basis. As such, Cloudpager can push application updates even when users are in active sessions.
Conclusion
I still tell junior admins about this nightmare at the bank as a cautionary tale! This example could end up on one of those forums covering IT admin’s catastrophes, but the simple fact of the matter is that if Cloudpager was available and used at the time, this would have been completely avoided. No desktop reboots would have occurred, even if the application update was pushed in the middle of the day. For those in active sessions, the application would have updated in the background within seconds, yielding zero downtime. Millions of dollars would have been saved!
Learn More
Continue our deep dive into the world of application updates and how Cloudpager can help with the rest of the blogs in the series!
Previous Blogs in the Series
- Blog 1: How to Achieve Truly Seamless Application Updates with Cloudpager
- Blog 2: Expedited Updates without Capable Tools Fracture Teams
- Blog 3: Weekend Updates Don’t Have to Take All Weekend
- Blog 4: A Poorly Timed Application Update Cost a Financial Services Organization Millions in Revenue
- Blog 5: Slow Application Updates Can Negatively Affect Patient Care
Upcoming Blog
Slow Application Updates Can Cost Lives
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