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.