Lost in the Cloud?

Only last week, Subex launched their new ROCcloud offering. Starting with Fraud Management SaaS, and hinting at more SaaS services to come, ROCcloud is a bold statement about where the future of revenue assurance is heading. But today, the problem is that the future of RA appears to be lost – quite literally. Trying to visit Subex’s dedicated site, roccloud.com, is returning a ‘404 not found’ error. I have not seen that happen to a major revenue assurance site since cVidya hastily buried the evidence of their World RA Forum scam. Google says they last cached the site on 26th April at 06:53 GMT. Has it been down since?

Three thoughts jump to mind. First, perhaps Subex underestimated the demand for their service and have found their new site was flooded by the demand it generated. In a way, that would be a good sign that Subex is making the right strategic decisions, even if execution is letting them down. Second, it is a big mean world full of people with the technical know-how to cause trouble; might this outage be the product of a Denial of Service attack? Finally, as the current B/OSS poll indicates, at least some potential customers will be nervous about downtime of services supplied over the internet. Whatever the cause, Subex need to rapidly restore their ROCcloud site to limit the reputation damage done to them and their exciting new proposition.

Eric Priezkalns
Eric Priezkalns
Eric is the Editor of Commsrisk. Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by Eric.

Eric is also the Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group (RAG), a global association of professionals working in risk management and business assurance for communications providers.

Previously Eric was Director of Risk Management for Qatar Telecom and he has worked with Cable & Wireless, T‑Mobile, Sky, Worldcom and other telcos. He was lead author of Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers, published by CRC Press. He is a qualified chartered accountant, with degrees in information systems, and in mathematics and philosophy.

4 Comments on "Lost in the Cloud?"

  1. Avatar Dead cat bounce | 1 May 2010 at 7:42 pm |

    At almost perfect timing found this snippet on the web, which leads to a question:
    “how safe is Subex from RA in the skies (or on a cload)”.
    On the other hand, who cares….

    April 22, 2008
    UK business falls victim to surge in cyber crime attacks
    …Europe show in London. “Large corporations are being actively targeted by hackers, often working in cahoots with organised crime and looking to steal confidential customer data which can be used for identity fraud,” said Chris Potter, partner at PwC, the consultancy, which conducted the research. According to the report, large businesses face thousands of attempts to… By Maija Palmer in London

  2. Avatar Dead cat bounce | 1 May 2010 at 7:48 pm |

    meant to post this one
    April 28, 2010
    Rising cybercrime costs UK £10bn a year
    …hackers, alerted many corporations to the risks of cloud computing.PwC estimates that about 34 per cent of British companies…However, only 17 per cent of companies using cloud computing are encrypting their data. “There are some blind… By Maija Palmer, Technology Correspondent

  3. Subex has taken every precaution to ensure that ROCcloud (www.roccloud.com) is safe and secure. On April 29, ROCcloud underwent planned maintenance and all customers were notified of the scheduled activities. Hardware was updated and a new release of the website/content was updated on the portal server. There was no DoS attack. We always have, and will continue to alert our customers ahead of time for any planned changes to our website content or planned updates to the ROCcloud FM application.

  4. Just to re-enforce that ROCcloud is completely secure and safe – here\’s the whitepaper on the security aspect of ROCcloud, titled \’What every CIO should know about data security for Subex ROCcloud\’ – https://www.roccloud.com/resource/list_resources

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