Parametrix developed and deploys advanced, proprietary technology to monitor constantly the functionality and performance of the world’s top cloud service providers. Each year, real-time monitoring by the Parametrix Cloud Monitoring System, or PCMS, conducts 36.4 billion availability and functionality tests on more than 250 cloud data centers. They provide the raw data that fuels our analysis of the potential downtime and service availability risk of each provider. That in turn allows Parametrix to compare, index, model, and price downtime events with precision. 

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We measure all the complete outage periods reported by the cloud service providers, but also - in great detail - the periods of impaired service and other disruptions which providers often do not reveal. We assess the impact of each interruption or degradation from a cloud user’s perspective. That allows us to create and provide risk transfer products which are able to react to any type of monitored disruption, based on real businesses’ actual dependency on the digital supply chain. We consider:

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• total duration

• the duration of each impacted unit within the event

• the mission-critical nature of the service to its users 

• the number of data centers affected, and
• multiple additional variables.

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Parametrix instantly identified nearly 1,200 performance interruptions and disruptions in 2022, four times the number revealed by the providers themselves.

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PCMS monitors the performance of each main cloud provider at regional and data-center levels (defined in Blog Post 2 of this series: Who Runs the Cloud?). It also identifies variations in the services provided from each of these locations, even when fluctuations do not constitute a complete loss of service. When a disruption occurs, Parametrix measures and summarizes the event, and identifies each instance of impact to a specific cloud service in a specific region - an ‘impact unit.’ For example, an event affecting both the Database and Compute services in a provider’s ‘US-East-2’ region would be recorded as two separate impact units. 

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Of 1,190 performance disruptions identified across the global cloud landscape in 2022 (excluding China), 41.4% were classified by Parametrix as critical. About a third of those critical events disrupted cloud provision somewhere in the USA. The balance was split roughly evenly between Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world.

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Understanding the risk of cloud downtime is the first step in making sure it doesn’t bring your business to a costly halt. This post is the first in a series about managing cloud outage risks in the Digital Supply Chain. You can read more about it in the Parametrix report revealing the details of cloud downtime among the three major providers – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.