Businesses migrate to the cloud

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Businesses world-wide are increasingly reliant on the cloud for their day to day functionality. In a recent survey by Parametrix, 95% of corporate decision-makers said their business is dependent on the cloud. Nearly half said the cloud is a mission-critical service. The cloud has rapidly become a universal element of the digital supply chain - and also its most widespread risk.

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The cloud economy

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The cloud economy is growing at an unprecedented rate. Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach $591.8 billion in 2023. That is an increase of two points from 18.8% growth in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. The breakneck growth is driven by the many benefits that the cloud offers, including flexibility, accessibility, and scale. Reliance on the cloud is therefore set only to increase in importance across the economy.

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Cloud outages are inevitable

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The cloud is reliable, but it isn’t perfect. Its imperfection is driven in part by a tradeoff between innovation and mistakes that result in errors. This tradeoff means that 100% uptime cannot be achieved when technology continues to improve, as it does almost constantly.

Providers will continue to improve reliability, but mistakes and shortfalls will still lead to downtime events. Therefore leading to business interruptions resulting in very real financial losses. As exposure to this developing risk increases, companies more often identify cloud outages as a key operational risk in financial reports and business continuity plans. They increasingly recognize cloud downtime as a risk that must be managed.

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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.