Cloud Computing Outages List 2012 – Multiple outages for Major players, CIOs concerned

Major cloud computing Players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Racksapce and Apple had major service outages in 2012 and most of them have no single but multiple outages during the year, which is major case of concern for the CIOs. Most of the cloud vendors have been facing these outages for the past few years and have taken precautions and developed new technologies but still the problems are persisting majorly because of the factors like human error, quality issues, technical glitches and natural disasters. As evident in the list above major cloud computing outages in 2012 were Google Gmail, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure , Apple iCloud and GoDaddy outages ranging from 2-4 hours affecting millions of users and companies like Quora, DropBox, Pinterest, Heroku, and NetFlix. Gartner analyst says the biggest concern should not be that data could be compromised in the cloud, but rather that there may be a cloud outage that could lead to data loss.

Amazon has been betting big on the cloud through its Amazon Web Services which started in 2006 that provide data storage, computing power and other technology services from remote locations through thousands of servers across many locations that has football sized buildings and Evercore analyst Ken Sena expects AWS revenue to jump 45 per cent a year, from about $2-billion this year to $20-billion in 2018. Even players like Microsoft, Google and many new players are entering in the cloud computing segment as cloud computing is cheap, relatively easy to use, and can be shut off, scaled back or ramped up quickly depending on companies’ needs. Outages are there for corporate data centres and telecommunications hubs that frequently triggered service disruptions which highlight the fact outages are not exclusive for cloud computing only. Cloud Outages are slowing down cloud computing adoptions and with significant investments by major players they will find difficult to convince the consumers particularly the large business organizations in regards to reliability and security of the infrastructure.

Businesses CIOs are concerned but they cannot resist the temptation of adopting cloud computing as the benefits outweigh the risks and most of the outages did not lead to any data loss but only downtime where the services and websites were affected. CIOs have to mitigate the risk of adopting the cloud computing by training employees, signing contracts and SLAs where the vendors commit safety of data and continuity of operations, understanding the risks and also spread loads across different locations, multiregion redundancy, Data backups, safety issues and also make sure that service providers take appropriate measures to overcome the frequent outages. Cloud service providers and vendors too have to work closely with customers and understand their need and make cloud infrastructure more reliable with new services, partnerships and contracting models to meet client expectations for increased delivery flexibility, cost transparency, and elasticity of consumption. Particularly significant number of outages is due to human errors and during the technology updates and maintenance which highlights that the vendors have to improve their quality of the processes, train their staff properly and make sure such mistakes are not repeated.  But the fact remains and most of the industry experts predict there will be rise in the cloud computing adoption in near future. 

List of Cloud Computing Outages 2012 – Businesses not prepared for outages

The month of June saw four cloud computing outages where in Google Gmail, Amazon Web Services, Apple iCloud and Twitter saw outages ranging from 2-4 hours and these are not big outages when compared to previous outages that these companies faced in the previous years that lasted for days. But millions of users and companies like Quora, DropBox, Pinterest, Heroku, etc who use the cloud totally or partially for running their day to day operations were severely affected which also led to a lot of negative chatter on social media platforms like blogs, discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Despite many precautions taken by cloud service providers there have been outages on a regularly basis caused majorly due to human errors, quality issues, technical glitches and natural disasters which also highlighted that there is no escape from cloud computing outages and companies have to include the outage risk concerns in their data security and disaster management plans. Cloud Computing has become a vital part of the IT infrastructure of many companies and reliance on cloud computing is even more increasing in the near future to power business, government, consumer services, etc and  major players in the space include Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, Salesforce, AT&T, Google, etc. Investing in Cloud computing is a significant IT decision that the CTO and his IT team along with consultations with CEO, CFO and other stakeholders have to make and also have to frame the necessary policy or upgrade the Organizational IT policy accordingly for the successful transition to cloud computing.

According to a recent report by the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency, every year minimum of 10 hours are lost because of service disruptions and according to the thirteen biggest cloud computing service providers since 2007 a minimum of five hundred hours has been lost, which also translates in monetary terms to be worth a minimum of $70 million. In that same report, the group claims that a cloud computing service is usually down for an average of 7.5 hours each year, although an electric power service outage is pegged at a low 15 minutes yearly. The group gathered the data from various sources such as Twitter, Amazon, Google, Paypal, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Cloud service analysis firm Newvem says 40% of Amazon's biggest cloud users are not ready for the next outage which can be totally blamed on those users only as they don't follow rule No. 1 in computing: make backups. This is a major threat for these companies as in case of a major outage they may loose critical and confidential data forever. Cloud users must create a back up of their data either on another cloud or on their premises. Some of the cloud providers like Amazon provide tools like Elastic Load Balancers, which automatically shift traffic around, and Snapshots, which automatically make backups. Cloud service providers should reduce the human errors, technology glitches, improve the testing process and prepare for tackling the natural disasters to avoid frequent outages and consumer confidence on cloud computing will be affected by frequent outages.

Apart from backing up the data cloud users too have to deploy the cloud across multiple geographical regions as highlighted by Amazon and it strongly discourages the practice of deploying in one region only as the two major outages on Amazon Web Services over the past two years were limited to servers in a single region (its Eastern US servers). So cloud computing services users must spread their workloads across various geographical parts of cloud service providers in order to prevent being hugely affected if an individual region experiences service disruption as for some of the companies their websites going offline for couple of hours will lead to significant amount of business loss both in terms of revenues and profitability added with brand reputation loss and customers moving to their competitors. Cloud computing users should realize the fact that cloud computing do not work on its own and the cloud service providers will take total responsibility for the data safety and smooth running of the business operations rather they should carefully monitor and manage the cloud performance and also have a back up and disaster plan in place especially for what will happen in the event of a service disruption. Companies should be very clear on how to integrate the cloud computing into their IT infrastructure and should also have total understanding of the cloud computing limitations and should have a plan in place to tackle the risks.  Both the users and providers of cloud services should have the relevant contracts in place and should also be very clear about the service level agreements.

List of Cloud Computing Outages in 2012:

SaaS Market will increase in near future –Vendors pushing & Businesses Adopting

Despite the turbulent economic environment, SaaS market has constantly grew at a healthy rate and the overall SaaS market did not grow as expected and it is still below 5% of the total overall software market and in next three years despite growing at healthy 20% rate its size will still be 20% of the overall software market. The growth of SaaS market had been slow as enterprises had concerns in terms of Data Security and integrity, cloud outages, privacy concerns, regulation, failure to understand contract terms and obligations, scalable pricing models, technology still under development with many players working on developing and improving the cloud technologies further, lack of skilled man power, and lack of sufficient cloud based applications available for enterprises to utilize. But businesses are being forced to adopt cloud computing particularly SaaS as the IT budgets have become tighter, the demand for SaaS solutions increased due to their lower implementation costs, faster deployment times, increasing familiarity with the SaaS delivery model and vendors effectively marketing them which also led to a growing comfort level with the security and performance parameters of cloud computing. According to IBM survey, 13% of organizations have substantially implemented cloud technology, which is expected to increase to 41% by 2015. Additionally, 21% of survey respondents said their companies are currently adopting the cloud and overall 90% of businesses expect to use the cloud in some capacity within the next three years.

In the times of economic slowdown and crises most of the businesses focus not on business expansion but look to improve profitability by reducing costs of the existing operations and this has driven the demand for SaaS offerings as IT plays crucial role in reducing costs. With rise in SaaS markets there will be erosion in the on premise software market particularly in next two years and businesses are forced to shift toward hybrid on-premises and Cloud offerings but ultimately much of that hybrid focus shifts toward pure-play SaaS/Cloud within just a few years. Gartner Research expects hybrid cloud computing will gain prominence and hybrid cloud configurations will allow organizations to move data and operations from a private to a public cloud easily, thereby improving scalability and efficiency. SaaS use is shifting away from point-solution-use and increasingly towards integrating business operation and management benefits and this fact is substantiated by the issues the most businesses are highlighting like integration and customization concerns. Even more IT organizations within the businesses are able to convince the management the return on investment on investing in cloud computing technologies and can safely move existing workloads and operations to the cloud to improve efficiency and service. For IT organizations too there are certain challenges like Cloud-based licensing are different from traditional on-premises licensing, the traditional software sales cycle is very linear (RFI, RFP, contract, maintenance, handoff to an internal sales rep), understand the Service level agreements and contractual obligations , acquire the relevant technology skills and develop a cloud centric IT strategy for the business with an ultimate goal of reducing costs and improving profitability and customer satisfaction.

According to Saugatuck’s 2012 Global Cloud Business Software Survey Data Report, CRM, Collaboration, Customer Support, HR/HCM, and Collaborative Commerce will lead SaaS/Cloud solution demand through 2016. The Unisys 2012 Predictions for Cloud Computing expects organizations – both IT and business units – will accelerate their adoption of SaaS solutions for email and collaboration to further reduce costs and simplify operations. Additionally, in 2012, Unisys predicts SaaS will extend into line of business applications, supporting mission-critical transaction processing. Over the next few years, intelligent analytics built into these SaaS applications will enhance the ability for organizations to support sales, supply chain, logistics and support personnel in real time, making better sense of huge volumes of data more quickly to provide better responsiveness and customer support. Along with large organizations, Small & Medium Businesses are embracing SaaS solutions as they are simple to install, minimal configuration, on-demand everywhere availability, and integrated web-based data backup. The most popular SaaS apps for SMBs are core business productivity tools like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365  and prefer to deploy other apps related to office, collaboration, customer relationship management solutions, marketing, project management, email list management, database development and administration tools.  Gartner believes in the next two years, buyers are most likely to purchase SaaS solutions in packaged CRM, procurement and ERP applications.

SaaS vendors too have to be constantly be in contact with their customers and understand their requirements and develop their offerings accordingly. According to Forrester Analyst, Holger Kisker in his post “Looking through the Cloud” explains SaaS vendors need an automated system that provides benefits to developers and customers alike:

Þ    Manage ongoing, dynamic metrics. Because SaaS typically uses a subscription licensing model, vendors need to manage the ongoing license entitlement and application usage for the correct billing process. And because the trend is going from user-based pricing to more dynamic metrics, the need for and challenge of providing continuous, automated usage tracking will only increase.

Þ    Track customer usage for product innovation. With limited (if any) feedback from sales reps, resellers, or implementation partners, SaaS vendors urgently need customer insights gleaned from usage to improve their solutions and feed the fast innovation cycle that SaaS solutions need to follow. Constant usage tracking provides detailed feedback on popular, critical, or unused features and functions and helps firm’s better target R&D investments.

Þ    Make gathering customer insights a two-way affair. Last, but certainly not least, customers will appreciate it if SaaS vendors play back some of their usage information, not only to monitor their license utilization but also to identify new opportunities, process optimization, and benchmark themselves against their peers.

Indian IT Outsourcing Vendors both large and small too have developed SaaS offerings and offering them to their customers and this is even more important for these vendors as they are looking at Cloud Computing offerings as a way of increasing their non linear revenues which helps them to charge higher billing and earn more revenues, increase profit. Unisys highlights the fact that organizations should increasingly consider SaaS a viable option for common line of business applications and IT management solutions, especially if they’re already considering outsourcing, as SaaS vendors may provide more cost-effective solutions than traditional outsourcers.  

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.

Global Cloud Computing Industry – 2011 & Forecast till 2020

Cloud computing is rapidly making inroads into most organizations but with concerns about security, identity, SLAs, outages, etc. Reasons for adoption of cloud services are that it frees companies from having to spend big on technology support and nullifies geography as a barrier to in-house information. Data from various sources suggests that businesses globally are either evaluating, planning, implementing, or have already adopted a cloud strategy. According to Gartner's 'Executive Program Agenda Survey”, Cloud computing has emerged as the top technological focus for CIOs. CIOs expect adoption of cloud technologies will free up to 50 percent of infrastructure and operational resources, which can be utilized for other strategic priorities. BFSI and manufacturing are the early adopters of cloud services. Communications, high-tech industries and public sector are interested in the potential of cloud services. North American and European markets are the largest markets and other geographies Asia Pacific and Latin America will experience growth.

There is a major difference in the estimates give by the three technology research firms. All the three firms have different perspectives in terms of nomenclature like Gartner calls it as Cloud Services Market and IDC talks in terms of Public and Private Clouds. Forrester view of BPaas is different from Business Process Services that are included in Gartner’s cloud services market. Forrester Research expects the global cloud computing market to reach $241 billion in 2020 compared to $40.7 in 2011. Gartner expects the global cloud computing market to reach $176.8 billion in 2015 from current $89.4 billion in 2011. IDC expects the global cloud computing market to reach $79.5 billion in 2014 form $21.5 billion in 2010. Cloud computing includes Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS). 

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