A lot of stuff in the IT world is considered ‘commoditized’, meaning that end users think all vendors in a given space (like IT support, or email) are alike and interchangeable.
Obviously, if you’ve used a lousy IT support provider in the past, you know that our team at Regala Consulting is different (ha!). But the point remains, and today’s blog is a stern warning against thinking that all vendors are the same.
Rackspace is one of the biggest names in virtual servers and cloud storage in the world.
Although not as large as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, Rackspace has been around for 25 years and offers a lot of services, including email via hosted Exchange servers. Last Friday, those servers were compromised and hit with ransomware.
The entire Rackspace Hosted Exchange email system, which generates around $30m in revenue every year and consists of at least hundreds of thousands of mailboxes, went down completely. Users were unable to send or receive mail, and calls to Rackspace support queues were on hold for 6 or more hours. Even now, almost a week later, users are still unable to access Rackspace mail servers and even worse, have no idea how much of their email data has been compromised. This is a devastating blow for thousands of small to medium sized businesses, who oftentimes use email to transmit sensitive data.
So the big question you’re probably thinking at this point is: How can you protect yourself?
Since no vendor is perfect, the unfortunate answer is that all you can do is minimize your risks by going with trusted, industry leading providers in the market. We always recommend Microsoft Office 365 for email and cloud services as they are most likely to resist attacks, protect your data, and have resiliency to minimize downtime. And of course for white glove IT support service for small businesses (or for anyone needing help dealing with the Rackspace outage), Regala Consulting is here and happy to help. Reach out to us at (858) 880-0355.