Accountability

Mistakes will happen, and plenty of times the answer isn't abruptly apparent. Admit it, figure out it, fix it, and move on. If this process troubles you, the technology business isn't likely to be your best fit.

We value the ability to diagnose problems as quickly and efficiently as possible, starting with the recognition that we all must be accountable for the parts we play. This isn’t about blame, if you have time for that, you aren't working hard enough. It's is about being honest where the problem lies so we can target it immediately and work together for a quick resolution.

Principals

We've had firmware in layer 3 switches from big name companies quite honestly act like they've been possessed by a demon from the void. We've seen more blue-screens-of-death and caused more kernels to panic than we care to count. We have pushed device firmware to the limits to exercise issues not found by mortals in day to day use. If you think your hardware or software is stable, great, but it's also possible it's just not be pushed hard enough in the proper directions.

The short story is this: Things happen that we don't have full control over, and many times don't have a quick fix for. When you are using software and hardware by a handful of 3rd parties, there are a lot of moving parts and as-yet-unknown glitches to be discovered.

Many problems are transient or faultless, easily repaired, and everything sails as it should.  But when you are maximizing performance and stability, you are still using a refined set of hardware and software solutions provided by 10+ high quality vendors.  Add in a couple hundred thousand lines of custom code, and you can start to see that every little change requires large amounts of battle testing.   Nobody wants any of this stuff to fail, but it will fail when provided enough time. The complexity is high, the amount of moving parts are vast, and hardware (especially with mechanical parts), does break down in ways that can't accurately be predicted.

At this stage of the KYNGIN product life-cycle, outages or delays are not a common event.  Most processes have been battle-tested and thoroughly debugged.  But issues do come up, and when they do we believe all that matters is how they are prioritized and handled.

Accountability relates to the transparency of our systems operations, even when that means accepting hard facts to issues when we contributed to the problem in some way.   When actions cause outages or delays or deliverability problems, we locate these faults, find the solutions, inform the customers, and deploy fixes.  The only reason for keeping a blame list around of past events is to make sure repeat offenders are rare, and when they become common, we move on to another vendor or build another solution.

Policies

Accountability relates to the transparency of our systems operations, even when that means accepting the hard facts that we contributed to the problem in some way. When actions cause outages, delays, or deliverability problems, we locate these faults, find the solutions, inform the clients, and deploy fixes. The only reason for keeping a blame list around of past events is to make sure repeat offenders are rare, and when they become common, we move on to another vendor or build our own solution. It’s our history of experience that has us choose one brand over another, one method as opposed to a different one, or even one direction among thousands of options. But at the end of each day, we are accountable for those choices that we make.

Debuggability and transparency are the fastest tools to fixing problems as they arise. KYNGIN systems proactively monitor and log events as they happen, and within the KYNGIN web interface, we keep a logged event history of all members actions. Our interfaces aren't spying on you to sell information to some other 3rd party; our business model is only providing services to you, the client that actually pays us. Our monitoring allow us (and only internal parties) to quickly inspect the operations that caused any hangups or failures. On the internal side, we create a seriously intense amount of logging of all automatic operations that KYNGIN performs. For any manual or scheduled operations performed by managers, we document the processes and attempt to update these processes into an automatic procedures once the interface becomes stable.

For data hosting solutions, we focus on keeping our systems secure to prevent any 3rd parties from accessing or witnessing any content in transit.  Specifically for e-mail, in which case we are storing large amounts of personal content, we have to have a very strict policy internally to prevent this information from ever being accessed without approval from the owner of said information. 

For website solutions, we do our best to incentivize our customers to encrypt all content in transit using TLS. 

For network file services or VM integrations, we keep all content specifically encrypted and isolated.

All of KYNGIN, hardware and software, has been built from a security conscious design decision. Technology isn't always secure, in some cases the history of design prevents completely secure protocols, in other cases the product is simple enough, encapsulated enough, or requires performance that encryption isn't warranted. In the areas of areas in which we cannot or do not fully secure, we do our best to explain these clearly in our FAQ's or direct to the client so everyone can have a clear picture how data exposed in-store or in-transit can affect them immediately or at a later date.

Final Note

Mistakes will happen, negligence should be rare and accidental at best. In any case of mistake, it's our job to admit fault when applicable, fix the problem, prepare for it not happening again, and move on. This is exactly the type of vendor we are, and the type of vendors and clients we'd like to affiliate with.

Accountability for technology companies is incredibly important. If people judge the companies they deal with by the standards they wish to see in their own quality of work, we can expect that our clients will be judging us on the same set of strict standards we expect from our vendors. We didn't get here over night. Accountability isn't just an ideal, it's practiced out of 20+ years of a methodology baked deeply into our business practices and product development.