Cloud Computing Outages 2012 – Issues still persist

2012 already saw three cloud computing outages and except for the Microsoft Windows Azure Outage which was publicized on the internet there has not been a major impact. There were some major outages in 2011 for major vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and lot of discussion was centered on how to be prepared and tackle such outages that had significant business impact for both the vendors and customers. Most of the outages are still caused by human errors as evident in the recent Azure outage which was due to a bug in the programming which also highlighted the testing issues and the quality assurance in the clouds. The human errors have to be eliminated and service providers have to find ways to minimize these errors despite the fact people are bound to make mistakes. Cloud Computing Service providers have to focus on testing and quality issues as they have to frequently update the programs, applications, infrastructure and cloud offerings according to the customer needs. Customers may have relied totally on the cloud for their businesses and the outage may lead to significant business losses and impact the reputation and performance of the business.

The fact remains that cloud computing outages are bound to happen and during the outages communication in terms of the reasons of outage, time to recovery and data safety is essential for the customers. Most of the service providers are providing the dashboards to the customers and are using internet based social networking tools like twitter, forums, blogs etc to communicate with customers during the outages. But the recent Azure outage the dashboard failed due to the traffic overload as the customers are looking for reasons of outage, when the cloud recovers and service availability normalizes. This highlights the need to use all the available modes of communications like the call centers, social networking tools like twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, blogs during the outage. One of the major issues that still persist is the lack of information and communication for the customers with the cloud service providers during the outages. Customers need the regular updates during the outages as they have to assess the business impact and the trouble their customers going to experience and finally brace for the eventual loss and how to minimize the loss. Customers business may be drastically affected due to outage and they will be forced to sue the service providers for the losses.

Customers wise they should work on the backup plan for the outages and in order to do that they need to understand the cloud architecture of the service provider. They should understand this in the initial stages of the discussions and should work closely with the service providers for developing the back up plan, escalation process and the Service Level Agreements should be very clear in terms of the disaster recovery, data security and financial liabilities due to the outages. Various modes of communications and the disaster recovery strategy during the outage have to be clearly formulated to minimize the business losses. Customers concerns and the need of communication with the service providers is highlighted recently during the Azure outage as the customers traffic to the dashboard overloaded which led to the dashboard failure. Social media tools like twitter, blogs, and forums were used by customers to voice their concerns about the lack of information or updates about the outage and were also searching for information about the outage on various social media platforms. Total reliance on the cloud computing model for the business is presently not suggestible for the customers as the cloud models are still evolving.

Despite the cloud outages for the major service providers like Amazon and Microsoft, Cloud computing is expected to see increased adoption particularly in the small and medium businesses as they see significant benefits in adoption. Even the large organizations are also increasing their investments in the cloud computing slowly as service providers are improving their infrastructures and offerings addressing the customer concerns of security, performance and governance. Major cloud service providers are also compensating the customers for the losses they suffer due to the outages and are communicating with customers and providing the detailed and comprehensive description of the outage, causes and corrective measure adopted to avoid future recurrence. But the communication during the outage has to definitely improve further and dashboards have to be more robust. Billions of dollars of investments are being made by major and smaller cloud service providers in the cloud computing and new models, infrastructures, and technologies are being developed. Cloud service providers have to still work on reducing the costs and improve the utility for the customers to adopt further.

Cloud computing spending worldwide has seen an increase of 25% in the past four years and many surveys have highlighted that most of the organizations across the globe are looking to make significant investments in the cloud computing as a top priority and already using some form of cloud computing within their organizations. With huge potential many new players are entering the cloud computing industry and are developing new models based on open source technologies, offering innovative offerings at attractive prices and investing billions of dollars in the infrastructure and R&D.  Major players like Amazon, Microsoft, etc are facing increased competition from such players and are competitively offering their services at comparative prices, offering financial incentives for the service outages, and are also improving their communication process during outages. 2012 is expected to be critical year for the success of the cloud computing industry.