Unless you're using the ACME protocol with a certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt, you're probably well aware of the annoyance of certificate rotation. Here at Datto, we use certificates in many places with a validity period of around a year, depending on the Certificate Authority. Last February, we noticed that several production hosts were providing expired certificates for one of our major Internet-facing domains - a mistake that many other companies suffer from, as well. This caused several problems, and it was decided that after the issues were addressed, we needed to take a very proactive stance in monitoring certificates for all of our TLS-enabled services. I will not dive into the details about why the certificates weren't properly rotated, but rather, what we're doing from now on so this sort of issue never occurs again.
We’ve all had a hard drive fail on us, and often it’s as sudden as booting your machine and realizing you can’t access a bunch of your files. It’s not a fun experience. It’s especially not fun when you have an entire data center full of drives that are all important to keeping your business running. What if we could predict when one of those drives would fail, and get ahead of it by preemptively replacing the hardware before the data is lost? This is where the history of predictive drive failure at Datto begins.