Best Games for Company Holiday Parties!

Akins IT • December 19, 2018

Every year our holiday party seems to get better! Our team has some favorite games that we do every year including the saran wrap ball game, LRC, and our white elephant game. We also had a festive hat competition where the best holiday hat won a gift card.

1. The Saran Wrap Ball Game: If you haven't ever played the saran wrap game, you have to check it out and think about incorporating it into your next holiday party. The gist of the game is this: You take whatever prizes you want and wrap them up in about 2 full rolls of saran wrap. Make sure the prizes are spread throughout the various layers of the saran wrap since the ball will pass to multiple people. The game starts with everyone gathering in a circle around a table and one person gets to start with the ball. The person to their left begins rolling 2 dice to try to get doubles. As soon as doubles are rolled, the ball passes to the person to the left as do the dice. Whoever has the ball tries to unroll the ball as quickly as possible to get the prizes until they have to pass it on. (More details here:)

You don't know how competitive your teammates really are until you put this game into action! Our ball was full of candy, Buffalo Wild Wings gift cards (a team favorite), Fandango gift cards, and lottery scratchers.

2. LRC- Left Right Center: Our team brings $3 each and the winner usually takes around $60 home!

3. White Elephant: Nothing new here, but it is a STAPLE. Our group always has so much fun bringing hilarious things. This year's gifts included a squatty potty, a flashlight taser, a motion sensor light for a toilet.

Hope your team has as much fun with these games as we did!

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)