Cloud Flare Up

Cloudflare went down this morning for a few hours. ChatGPT, X, and Anthropic vanished from the internet for millions of users. 

"What is Cloudflare?" most of the population wondered. I had my eye on Copilot, which kept working -- even though it's built on OpenAI's tech. 

This is a great example of one of my goals for Two Cents: to act as translator and mentor for nonprofit staff who are not steeped in tech savviness. 

For three years I've been in a master class studying "the mothership" (Microsoft) and becoming fluent in GPT. As interpreter of new technologies and AI, I can help our clients, wherever they're ready to start, to build what they need, at the pace of their capacity and budget.

Not everyone needs to understand the entire blueprint or ecosystem of Microsoft. But let me be honest. A quick tour wouldn't hurt. 

I hope you will join me for a free webinar this Thursday to learn more: https://lnkd.in/e-NYHKeA

In the meantime, see if this helps: Imagine your company's collection of Microsoft products as a city...

Windows 11 is the city's infrastructure: the roads, traffic lights, utilities that make everything function and hopefully flow without crashing so we can all navigate around easily. Without this foundation, nothing else works.

Microsoft 365 represents all of the buildings where work and services happen: offices, libraries, and meeting halls. Copilot is like the smart assistant at the info desk, helping you find information, draft documents, and automate tasks so you can focus on what matters.

Then there's Azure, Microsoft's power grid in the cloud, supplying energy and connectivity. It's also a security guard monitoring entry systems, making sure the right people access the buildings where they're permitted and protecting the city from threats. Azure is always online to keep everything running, safe, scalable, and available to relevant audiences and staff.

In our city metaphor, think of Cloudflare as a security company that works for various gated communities outside the city walls. While Cloudflare was down, no one could get past the guard's booth into the enormous data HOAs of ChatGPT, Anthropic, or X. 

Copilot is contained within the city walls of Microsoft, where Azure does the gatekeeping. This is why Copilot was still available during the Cloudflare outage.

Whatever caused Cloudflare's outage, or the similar recent AWS outage, many millions of people were impacted and all metaphors aside, outages happen. Breaches and phishing and scams are real. Access gets disrupted. Getting back online becomes critical. 

If you're not sure where to start or what question to ask first, you are not alone. 

Join us for a free webinar, where I'll map this out to help you understand what's most important to you and your team as we all head into this wide blue yonder together.

https://lnkd.in/ePBKaMB3