back to article IBM’s McAfee-as-a-service cloudy antivirus wobbled for nearly a day

IBM’s cloud experienced an “unplanned event” that caused its McAfee-as-a-service offering to operate with sub-par performance for nearly a day. “At approximately 0347 AM UTC on June 20, engineers with Compute Infrastructure identified a database issue that necessitated the restoration of a key update repository for McAfee …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I used to know a great IT company called IBM, but they went out of business many years ago.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      IBM's greatness ended when they dumped OS/2 to appease Microshaft.

  2. Mark 85

    Security = McAfee?

    IBM touts McAfee-as-a-service as part of a portfolio of offerings to help its customers secure and defend their rented servers in the Big Blue cloud.

    My question is are you better off with McAfee or without any security at all? Tough choice, I know.

    1. returnofthemus

      Re: Security = McAfee?

      No, anything that renders your machine inoperable whilst running is a Virus, I'm surprised IBM has it running on their cloud, let alone anyone being stupid enough to pay for it, was this not the security outfit that Intel divested???

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How many customers were affected?

    Both?

  5. Robert Helpmann??
    Childcatcher

    Wha' ha' happened was...

    It sounds like one or more ePO management servers went tits-up for a time. That would prevent new policies and tasks from being sent to machines as well as any metrics from being gathered centrally, but it would not prevent the existing software from running client-side. It also would not prevent DAT files (AV or otherwise) from being pulled directly from McAfee, the default last resort repository, unless previously specified by policy in which case they could still be updated manually.

    The point of this framework is that it can suffer an outage of this nature and still continue to provide protection.

    1. theblackhand

      Re: Wha' ha' happened was...

      Surely the scale of the issue (27 data centres) would be beyond what a single ePO instance could manage if it was the cause of the outage? And if the ePO service had been scaled out (i.e. via region or customer), then surely they wouldn't manage to screw them all at once?

      I say surely, but maybe the take up of the service has been particularly low...

      1. Robert Helpmann??
        Childcatcher

        Re: Wha' ha' happened was...

        Surely the scale of the issue (27 data centres) would be beyond what a single ePO instance...

        Just taking a guess that it was a single ePO server that had the issue from this statement:

        "...engineers with Compute Infrastructure identified a database issue that necessitated the restoration of a key update repository for McAfee Antivirus services from backup."

        I was basing it on the idea that IBM has set things up to use a single ePO server as their main repository. It is possible to do this and has some benefits in terms of restricting outside access and allowing custom modules to be rolled out, but it also creates a single point of failure.

  6. Mike Moyle

    McAfee-As-A-Circus, more like it...

    This space intentionally left blank.

  7. Darn_Tootin

    No SuckAfee for me

    McAfee made it clear it didn't want my family's business years ago when first it refused to install on my Windows 98 system merely because I didn't have Internet Explorer 6 installed, then a half decade later when I tried to help my mother renew her McAfee subscription but was refused because her billing postal code coincidentally was also used in a Middle Eastern region and the idiot payment processor developers were too lazy to actually correlate the user's postal code with the rest of the address.

    I recently bought a new laptop that came with a one-year subscription of McAfee antivirus. Day one, I uninstalled McAfee and installed something else.

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