 Time here from Warren Systems. We're going to talk about the Unify Protect Cloud Outage. And then people tagged me this in Twitter. And then, of course, someone, apparently their cap stock was broken and let me know that I'm on the ubiquity payroll. Therefore, I can ban from talking about this, which is absurd. But I usually don't address haters, but I was going to do this video whether that person had made that comment or not. I just didn't have any information on it or time and kind of the debrief had to be put together, which not by me. I kind of wanted to hear from Unify their side of the story what happened, because from my side of the story is, I don't know, it wasn't working for roughly 11, 12 hours and then it was. And that's all I really knew. So we don't know why the server went down, what the time when it was down we didn't. And now we have a better insight into it. And I want to address some of the concerns people had about it and share my thoughts from both a business perspective and the perspective of what to do with the Unify Protect system if it goes down and how it's being addressed. Before we jump into that, if you can take a second and click that like button and first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to laurancesystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out, well, randomly. So check back frequently. And finally, our forums, forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now back to our content. And we'll begin with their debrief. On August 25th, we experienced a global outage where some users were unable to access Unify Protect cameras for approximately 12 hours. The video recordings were not affected. That's because they're stored locally. And this also affected UDM Pro, UNVR connecting through UnifyUI.com were not impacted. Now, this is a couple different components they have for their cloud connection. And I'll cover some of the technical stuff in that shortly after we read through this debrief. Ubiquity strives to keep all of our services available and reliable, marketing speak. But yeah, well, sure, it doesn't every company. I mean, no one wants their cloud down. Our cloud infrastructure handles authentication for Unify Protect remote access. This is where the problem occurred. Due to the unusually high load on the service, remote access functionality became unstable and eventually went down. We're able to resolve the customer facing issues by provisioning a new fleet of servers to handle the increased load. And resolving the immediate issues does not mean our job is done. A post-sense review is underway. And as followed up by what they're going to do since Tuesday's outage, and this is four days ago, we have taken several mitigation measures. Mobile app has been updated to remove internet dependency for locally accessing Unify Protect controller, released on Android and iOS. Moving forward, the Unify Protect camera's no automatic firmware updates, which is actually part of what caused the problem. Will be pushed unless auto update is turned on. We are enhancing our cloud infrastructure to minimize outages as the Unify Protect platform continues to grow. We are improving our public communication with any future incidents. As there was speculation about the source of the August 25th incident in the interest of transparency, we want to share a few additional details. The August 25th outage was caused by firmware updates pushed to Unify Protect cameras, which fixed the connectivity issue. When all cameras came back online, the resulting load to the cloud infrastructure caused the outage. An additional on the 28th here, on August 28th, during our scheduled maintenance to improve the resilience of our cloud infrastructure, our servers experienced challenges that exerted beyond the maintenance window. Some users were unable to access Unify Protect cameras during that period. Video recordings were not affected. And users of UDM and UDM Pro were not impacted. So let's talk about this from a business perspective. First, from a business perspective, and there's a plenty of angry people right now talking about Unify and the fact that there's this cloud dependency on there, even though their niche is having local eastward items. I kind of get where this is a big challenge because I don't know an easy answer, but they shouldn't have, well, the easier answer I guess you should say is don't make any cloud dependency. That's fine for people who are more technical like myself and maybe many of you. The challenge is, if you've been working in tech for over 25 years, you remember all the port forwarding we always had to do for every single device. You couldn't have just set up a doorbell and plugged it in and it just worked. That is wonderful that it does. It's wonderful that it automatically connects to an app. But in the days of old, we always had to port forward everything. So that ease of use, that limited amount of friction are trying to create between the users that want to deploy this. And they can't like, I don't know, do we need an IQ test before we buy it? Where we say, how good are you at networking? Can we turn off the cloud or are you gonna be a support call if we turn it off? I wish that was kind of an option. So you can say, I'm an advanced user and I'm going to forgo the need for any type of tech support because I don't want any cloud stuff and I like to all connect locally. Great. Unfortunately, Unify is not really doing that. They kind of just do for the larger audience because that's where their target is not that one person who's very tech savvy because I know how to do a port forwarding. I don't want this in connected to the cloud. So those kind of business decisions kind of get rationalized and deployed. Unfortunately, it's absolute dependency on it. I think is where the problem was which they seem to have resolved by removing the absolute dependency, which means if the cloud's down but you know the local IP and you have authentication, you can log into it. I did complain when I set up the Unify Protect before. I said, I wish it didn't force you to register with their cloud. But as I stated from a business standpoint, I think the majority of people just kind of expect that kind of behavior and that makes it easier for them to set up versus I wish it was always an advanced box option but even look at companies like Microsoft and they're doing something similar where they try to get every account on your local system tied to it. And you know part of the trick is, yeah, you gotta plug the internet so you can finish setting it up and let it think it's offline just so you can set it up without it trying to go online. There's all kinds of companies doing this. It's kind of a big trend in the market and there's not a lot of competitors in this market space that don't do it because most of the companies have fully cloud-enabled subscription systems which is usually what people are trying to avoid and I know there's at least a handful of other NVR tools out there but Unify's made it really nice. That's what makes it such an attractive product. Now let's swing over to the privacy people. I agree with you and I think that Unify should be more transparent about what they're doing, how this works, what connections are being made but I also realized that well, privacy people, myself as I would include in that list are going to be the minority and not the greater audience that shareholders who are looking for a profitable company are not going, you know what, let's just focus on these privacy small niche people. I wish there was more of us but there's not. They focus on the broader audience so there's always going to be some levels of, yeah, there's gonna be some issues. This is one of the reasons I'm such a big advocate of open source software and someone's going, but you're an advocate open source software and also talking about Unify and they're not open source. I said, I know. I also have a business to run myself and I have to make decisions when we have a handful of little pizza places and small business offices and even some of the home users that go, you know, I really want it easy to use camera system that works that, you know, I don't have time if their IP address changes. So obviously them being on the cloud and having some type of automated system that just keeps their camera connected so they can look at the front door of the pizza place whenever they want, Unify has got a great solution for that and it's easy to use for a person who's less tech savvy that I can just put the phone in their hand, they open up the app and it just works every time except for 12 hours where it didn't work. So it's not that I'm denying that, you know, that wasn't an issue but for the most part it's been a pretty solid system and, you know, these small business owners are getting $5 a month to death as they like to tell me because everything's a subscription service. So getting a camera system that's also on a subscription service is one more, you know, to add to the pile of getting $5 to death on something that seems like there should be a solution which there is, it's the Unify. So I will disagree with some of the decisions they made around the Protect but I will also say I understand some of those decisions. It's not me justifying it, it's just offering perspective. I'm still with you and shaking my hand in rage going, please just quit forcing me to register with your stupid cloud server if I don't want to. It should be an option. I don't mind if the default option is register but if it's option that I am an advanced user can click that makes a little bit more sense to me and hopefully that's where they go in the future as far as transparency from ubiquity or thinking that I have any connection. If I send me a ring or I'm gonna call it a ring doorbell I know it's not, it's the competitor in some way but the G4 doorbell and I get to keep the doorbell. That is my compensation for doing a review. I get to keep the NVR back here that is connected to and that's how they compensate me but it does not offer me any better insight into the way the company works or operates. They actually are a little bit opaque. I think they could do a better job of being transparent. Matter of fact, if someone from Unify would like to do an interview with me, hey, I'm super easy to get a hold of. They know how to send me products. They could certainly send me someone who would like to talk about the inner workings of ubiquity. I believe everyone would like to hear it in time. Maybe if we can get an interview with the president of ubiquity, himself, Rob, that'd be great. Hey, Rob, hi, if you've got time. Anyways, I still like their overall product line of things especially around their networking in terms of their switches and their access points are still my favorite product line they have. I'm still as upset as many of you are with the entire debacle that has been the video line which means it's not something as much that I actively will push to people but we have a lot of clients out there that includes a lot of these pizza places that we originally sold them the original four channel NVR system. If you remember the original small Unify video box that we later upgraded them to a Unify Protect on a couple cameras with a Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus or some of them have now got the Unify NVR because it's a cheaper solution than rip and replace and buy all new cameras. They already have the cameras they just now have an unsupported NVR. Like I said, I'm not happy about the original Unify video being dropped but that's life and we've moved them over to the Protect system. So, I'm still, like I said, with you guys I'm not trying to hide anything from ubiquity. I normally wouldn't address that and if you would like to commiserate with people about how Unify will be out of business in no time their poor product decisions are bringing an end to the company. I'll leave a link to this. There is a, you know, it feels like they got caught and a bunch of people are ranting about it how they're never gonna use ubiquity and have to move off the entire platform because of this cloud outage and this forcing of firmware upon us which the last thing I'll address is that there's a couple options you have as a business. Be in trouble for having a buggy product or be in trouble for having an insecure product or force an update and Microsoft has probably tainted the world a bit to the concept of updates because everyone knows Microsoft updates are notoriously random and break lots of things. Every update is more like a brace for impact for all people in IT but overall I'm gonna say that the updates from a lot of other companies if you look at a bigger scale go pretty smooth and pushing a firmware update to fix a problem with your devices. You're that damned if you do damned if you don't ubiquity even without updates being enabled force this firmware update is what triggered everyone on the privacy side and have them ranting over here because yes they did just push the update but the other side of that is if you don't push the update everyone complains about your product not working but so many challenges that we solve for people who contact us for consulting as we get in there and we see everything's way out of date and we find out most of the challenges they're having many of them if they're first if they got the network configured properly they're step one, two did they have the latest firmware that probably solves these problems I see companies like running way like a year or two years behind on firmware but complaining they're having issues and because people even in the tech field don't update to general consumer wow they don't update at all they'll just complain about things but not really dig into it so that's why ubiquity force the updates and we'll probably continue to leave auto update on but they won't force it so the advanced users who say I'm just not ready for new firmware because I don't know what's in it because they're not good at disclosing exactly what changes were made because once again it's closed source so we can easily reverse engineer it you're gonna have to deal with that like these companies do like pushing it hopefully we can turn it off if there's a reason to but I actually leave mine on because I want the latest firmware one because I wanna do the testing with it too if there's a major security in a product I wanna know, I want it fixed, I want it mitigated so even though there's some risk levels in auto patching there's a bigger risk if there's a major flaw in a product that would leave a way in or a compromise for it and from ubiquity standpoint allowing people just to not update the same problem Microsoft has by allowing people not to update you now create more security problems but of course Microsoft has also put the fear that the update will disrupt work so little security problems so you have to figure out which devil you wanna dance with essentially in there so that's my whole rant on this topic I'll leave links to both of these the Unify review and the people who wanna commiserate about the downfall of Unify over this and join in there I personally still really enjoy their networking equipment and I can separate out them as a departmentalized company where I say all right this is the Unify network team that works on this I don't know what the crossover is and this is the Unify video team which has angered all of us and that has caused me to feel differently about Unify video not cause the outage but the overall like the Unify video dropping and the Unify protect system and some of the craziness around there but I still like their networking gear and specifically their switches and their access points because that seems to be a bread and butter works differently of the company that I really like so I'm gonna continue on those products but the people who are commiserating apparently if one product from a company is bad that means the whole company is bad and they're not thinking about just the scale and scope of some of these companies and that they almost run like a series of companies inside of there with all their divisions but I'll let you, you know I just wanna add some context to let you have your own thoughts on this and you're of course free to rant on it and still blame me for being unappearable but if anyone for Unify wants to reach out that's my final thing I'll ask again hey, you know I wouldn't mind doing an interview you have an interesting company there's obviously I talk about it on my channel quite a bit and if we had more insight and more transparency for you that's a good way to win people over just talk about it I like to talk about my business I'd like to talk about the Unify business, thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time