Third-party services help businesses run efficiently when they don’t have enough resources of their own. But when these services are disrupted, businesses are impacted.

In the world of business, technology is a necessity to run efficiently and ensure security. Technology enables us to do things we couldn’t otherwise do, or shorten the time it takes to complete a task that would take a human much longer to complete. The problem is, technology, like the people who create it, is imperfect. Threat actors seek out and exploit weaknesses, known or otherwise. Servers and systems crash. And amid the digital transformation movement, businesses are learning that being reliant on a single service for any aspect of business is a bad idea. It’s not just about backups and having a plan for mission critical services, it’s about third-party services and how they impact business operations. 

One thing we always recommend is that businesses do not rely solely on one service to provide a function of business. For example, at the end of November, GitHub experienced a two-hour outage. During that time, Git operations, API requests, GitHub actions, packages, pages and pull requests were all impacted. The outage happened around 3:45pm on November 27th and was resolved before 6pm.

GitHub is one of the most widely used open-source repositories available to developers worldwide. There are over 73 million developers who rely on the service for hosting for software development and for version control. Some developers and companies will host an entire project and code on the service, and there are over 100 million repositories hosted on the site. Companies of all sizes, from small business owners to Apple, Google and Microsoft all rely on GitHub in some way.

Fortunately, outages like these are rare. The last major outage at GitHub was in June 2020, which was also a two-hour outage. Unfortunately, outages like these, while rare, still happen. We’ve seen cloud outages and ransomware attacks and spent nearly an entire day without Facebook dominating our lives in the last year alone. The impact of these events is real, and that this GitHub outage happened on a Sunday has little bearing on its impact. The pandemic and remote work era have already shown that the traditional work week is likely a thing of the past, developers can write code from literally anywhere, and most people now work when it fits their schedule.

This is why we say that businesses cannot rely on one single service for their business. It’s not just having backups for outages or plans for mission critical work to continue in the event of a problem. It’s about making sure your business isn’t ground to a halt when one of your third-party services goes down. It’s not a matter of “if” that’s going to happen, but a matter of “when” that’s going to happen. It is far better to have alternate services to use and not need them than to not have them and a problem occurs.

GitHub isn’t the only Git repository provider out there. A quick Google search will yield a number of other options with varying levels of service and price points. Once you figure out what your business needs are, you can compare and determine which one(s) are appropriate.

While all businesses use different services for different reasons, one thing remains the same: business owners should consult an expert to review their systems and processes. An expert can ensure those systems and processes are the most efficient and cost-effective methods for your business, and if not then they can make a recommendation to help you fix it. As a business owner or business leader, you are focused on making sure that business stays alive, especially in today’s global economy. Let someone else make sure pennies are saved and efficiency is top-notch.