Every few months, news headlines are peppered with a story about the most recent cloud outage, and those are only the ones you hear about. How can you limit the impact cloud outages can have on your operations and finances
The benefits of the cloud are undeniable and include improved functionality, security, efficiency, and stability. In today's always-on, instant-everything world, it's hard to argue against using the cloud. But the cloud, and cloud providers, are not infallible.
Every few months, news headlines are peppered with a story about the most recent cloud outage, and those are only the ones you hear about. In fact, downtimes happen quite often even though top cloud providers, including Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s GCP, can offer 99.9% uptime as part of their SLAs.
When cloud services stop working, everyone panics, and with good reason. Many businesses depend on constant access to their cloud-based mission-critical products and services, so cloud downtime can stop work in its tracks. In the best-case scenario, downtime lasts only a few minutes and affects a few minor services; in the worst case, businesses are paralyzed for half a day or even longer, and the effects can be highly detrimental, costing companies $9,000 or more per minute.
The same situation unfolds each time there is an outage. Users take to social media to ask if others are experiencing downtime and can't access critical cloud services. Usually, the cloud service provider begins to make statements within an hour at most, acknowledging the downtime and letting the public know they are trying to restore services. Sometimes a post-mortem is released detailing the incident and causes. Other times, no such report or statement is made, leaving many to wonder what happened.
So, what are the most common causes of cloud outages? Below, we'll look at what an outage actually is and what kinds of incidents trigger downtime events. In a follow-up post, we'll explore what kind of financial impact downtime events have on the most cloud-dependent industries.
A cloud outage is when the cloud infrastructure or a particular cloud service becomes unavailable or performs inadequately in relation to the cloud provider's SLA metrics. Outages triggered by a single failure can have a waterfall effect that ripples across multiple services or systems.
Cloud outages are caused for a range of physical and software reasons, some of which are within the control of service providers while others are not, including:
Outages are a reality that technology-dependent companies should plan for in advance. In general, you can trust that reputable cloud service providers have put huge amounts of money into ensuring uptime, while also acknowledging the fact that outages can and will happen.
To limit the impact cloud outages can have on your operations and finances, you can place your cloud services in one of the more stable regions, use redundancy measures, or transfer your risk by purchasing insurance coverage, or employ a combination of all three methods. Whatever you decide to do, don’t neglect this issue because the damages can be significant to both your business continuity and your reputation.
[ Downtime Happens | Better make sure you’re covered | Learn more ]