Apply Critical Thinking

Cloud Computing

You work as a network provider for Cloud Solutions, a mid-size cloud solution provider. Your

company is an AWS Channel Reseller partner that configures and resells AWS services to clients

around the world.

One afternoon, you received an email from Jessica Lopez, who works in the Customer Services

department. She received a call from one of her clients, Green Machine Marketing, about an

error message that they are getting. Jessica couldn’t figure out the issue and is asking you for

help to troubleshoot the problem. In researching the issue, you found out that a former co-

worker, Jim Black, who is no longer with the company, had incorrectly configured one of the

cloud services for Green Machine Marketing. This has caused the error message that they are

seeing. More troubling, the misconfiguration also caused the client to be over-billed by several

thousand dollars per month for the past year. They are being billed for services that they didn’t

request or need. At the same time, AWS cloud resources are being dedicated to them because

of this error and Cloud Solutions (your company) is paying AWS for these resources.

You mentioned this to your supervisor, Ben Smith, who is the manager for the network

engineering team. He said that we can’t tell anybody about this. If the client found out, we will

have to refund them the entire amount that they have been overcharged. In addition, the steps

to fix the incorrect configuration would require that the client’s services be shut down for at

least 30 minutes. A 30-minute downtime would trigger a penalty based on the current Service

Level Agreement with the client. You explained to your supervisor that without fixing the

configuration error, you won’t be able to address the issue that was brought up to you by the

help desk.

In the meantime, you received another email from Jessica Lopez in Customer Services asking

the status of the issue. She wrote that the client has called again as they continue to get error

message. The client wants to know when the issue will be resolved.

What should you do? Please provide a rationale for your answer.