ChatOps

Chapter 15. Reliance on Third-Party Chat Service

In Chapter 12 we discussed some of the concerns of ChatOps regarding security. In many cases, organizations are not able to utilize SaaS offerings due to company policy. On-premise installations of any and all services leveraged by the company’s end users are absolutely required to fall in line with security policies. Not being in control of company data or intellectual property are concerns that keep security officers up at night, and for good reason. There are other concerns with using a “hosted” service as well.

The software and infrastructure on which all SaaS offerings operate is extremely complex. As a result, occasional failure or disruption of services is unavoidable. At some point, the hosted service that your team or organization relies on is going to have some sort of minor (or major) outage that impacts your ability to get work done. We all hope that the entity hosting and managing the service will be able to detect it, alert us, and repair the problem as quickly as possible, but some times outages last far longer than hoped. How does that impact your team and organization? In some cases it could mean little more than an extended coffee break until the status page of the service gives the “service restored” update. In other cases it may mean a loss of income. The possible ramifications are varied and abundant.

Because of this, many companies are hesitant to rely on third-party services. In the event that something ...