Enterprise Architecture

I've been discussing SaaS and Mashup reliability for the past few posts, and I expressed concern about security and reliability of outside services, expecially in mission-critical applications.

Well, something has happened today to reinforce my points. Those of you that are frequent visitors to my blog know that I use blogrolling.com to list links to other IT and architecture blogs that I read and that you will hopefully find interesting also. They should appear on the left under the 'Links' header. I check my blogs every day as regular user before posting anything, and this morning, my blogroll disappeared inexplicably. Perhaps as you read this, it has returned, but at the time I posted this, it hasn't.

Here's what you get when entering blogrolling.com's URL at the current time:


Don't know what else to call this other than a hardcore outage. No explanation or redirection, no notice, no nothing. The basic services offered by this site are free, but the advanced ones aren't. What about the paying customers?

You might be thinking 'blogroll.com...so what?' Replace 'blogroll.com' with 'criticaldata.com' or 'customerservice.com' or 'taxreturn.com' or 'emergencymedicalrecords.com' and let's see how important reliability and security become as we move to the new paradigms.

No amount of agility or claims of 'working software' fixes the issues of reliability, security, and transparency. We have to design all of that in up front in architecture, regardless of what methods or practices we use.