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:
