A few years ago, at the dawn of Office 365, I attended an event where speakers were explaining the benefits of Office 365. As at every cloud-related conference, the ominous question was asked:
But what if there is no internet?
The speaker, who had heard this question before, said this without any phlegm and with maximum kindness:
There is always internet!
Let's take a look at this statement. If we take it literally, it's pretty clear that the statement is not true. Although Hungary boasts exceptionally good numbers in terms of internet and mobile internet coverage, there are certainly areas where it's not really possible to get internet from nowhere. There is a village in northern Hungary that is such a popular destination for corporate team building because, due to its geographical location, there is no mobile coverage in its area. But what if we don't take the statement literally, but rather try to understand what the poet (the speaker) meant.
Let's take an average office worker in Budapest… let's say me. Currently, my notebook connects to the internet via a desktop dock, the speed of which is always above 200 Mb/sec (according to 3 speedtest measurements). Ok, so now let's see what happens if the network connection is lost and I unplug the ethernet cable from the dock. As a user, I didn't really notice any difference, as my machine automatically connected to the primary company Wifi. The internet speed is still above 200 Mb/sec.
But what happens if the company Wifi is not available? In this case, my computer automatically connects to the guest Wifi, which is a completely separate network. I only notice this because I have to log in to a separate VPN.
So what if there is no internet anywhere in the entire company, because, say, someone forgot to pay their internet service provider bills, or a digger cut the fiber optic cable running next to the office building (you wouldn't believe it, but this is a fairly common case). In such cases, there is no other solution, you have to share the internet from the company phone and, oops, there is internet again.
Anyone could rightly ask after this, what if the ethernet cable breaks, the corporate wifi network and the guest network router die, and both my private and corporate phones are stolen and I can't get internet from them. Now, in this very likely situation, there is no other solution, you have to walk 50 meters to the nearest mall / cafe / fast food restaurant, where free wifi networks are located on the mountain.
As the example above shows: the probability of an on-premise terrestrial mail server going down is much higher than the probability of not being able to access a cloud service due to a lack of internet.
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