One Data Center?

RIM explains BlackBerry outage By Patrick Marshall, GCN Staff Last Tuesday’s outage of e-mail services for BlackBerry mobile devices left millions of users wondering where their e-mail went...It’s worth noting, however, that one factor contributing to the widespread nature of the outage is the BlackBerry system’s highly centralized message routing. All BlackBerry e-mails are routed through one of two network operations centers — one in Canada serving the Western Hemisphere, and another in England serving Europe, Africa and the Middle East, according to a Gartner report issued last summer. (Government Computer News)

As any good network person will tell you, you do not design a system to have a single point of failure if you can avoid it. Any good postmaster will tell you that when it comes to email, there is no such thing as an acceptable amount of downtime. RIM, for all the good its little toy does, seems, not only to have forgotten those cardinal rules, but seems not to care.

Now, to be fair, this is only the first major outage the company has experienced, but there are a couple of questions that have to be asked. First, with only one data center serving the entire western hemisphere, is it logical to be banking on BlackBerries for critical traffic during an emergency? Second, is it a good idea for organizations that deal in sensitive and classified information to be issuing these things like candy to people that may not realize the inherent insecurity of shipping email messages to and through Canada?

BlackBerries depend on four vital components to function. A near by, powered, cell tower; a functioning connection to the data center in Canada from that cell tower and a return route to the email service it is trying to connect to, be it the corporate or government data center; and two functioning data centers, one at RIM and the other at the agency or corporation being talked to. A failure in any one of these makes them little more than useless lumps of plastic. I guess I should throw in that there has to actually be a functioning BlackBerry on the end, so batteries or power. This makes the whole lash up very sketchy at best and fraught with all kinds of places for it to break down or be broken down. And yet, the Federal Government relies on and has written emergency procedures around the unquestionable availability of these devices. As we saw, the network is not flawless.

The second issue is not quite as spooky, but there are some agencies that are having trouble keeping a lid on their data. Only this morning, the Department of Agriculture again announced a data breach. And yet, the Government and other entities are shipping Gigabytes of data to Canada before it is turned around and sent to the carriers. Now, I hope that the data stream leaving the core Blackberry servers in the data centers around the United States has a better encryption than 128-bit key, but I am not holding my breath on that. Further, these devices really were not designed for sensitive data. This is generally true of any email system that does not use encryption on the front end, and most do not, leaving it up to the individual user. So we have a large quantity information flying around the Internet just waiting to be mined. Maybe I need to point my packet sniffer in a different direction today and see what I can come up with.