Cloud Service Outage – Impact to Cloud Strategy
By: James P. Quinn
Techrealestatetrends.com
Amazon’s cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), had an outage for four hours this week that affected a diverse group of approximately 1,000 U.S. corporations. The outage was limited to the U.S but had a huge impact. It was due to an Amazon employee making an error with a simple typo entered command. “The AWS outage affected our company’s productivity across the board. Websites using AWS for caching were slowed, several email platforms were disabled, and our primary source of web hosting had their site disabled by this outage. If we continue to experience outages like this, we will need to diversify our infrastructure,” says Eric Zwierzynski, a Designer at Swell Creative Group, a communication program development company based in Los Angeles.
This outage comes at a time when corporate IT departments are focused on restructuring their IT portfolio to build more flexibility and cost savings by migrating from more traditional legacy IT networks. Currently, cloud migration and cloud transformation are high priorities for corporations in evaluating the right approach to their IT infrastructure. “This outage is a warning flare that corporations need to deploy a diverse strategy to protect their IT infrastructure,” says Evan Smethurst, Vice President of Cloud Advisory at JLL. Smethurst focuses on providing cloud advisory services for corporations on a global basis.
There has been progress in corporations preparing for these cloud outages. NETActuate, a software-enabled IT infrastructure company that focuses on network, cloud and data center services has been working to prevent these possible outages from affecting their client’s infrastructure. “We have been able to implement a cloud transit service that enables people to connect their virtual private clouds in multiple regions to get instantaneous failover to mitigate the impact of this issue,” says Brandon Tedder, VP of Business Development at NETActuate.
The latest occurrence is another reminder why U.S. and global corporations need to be pro-active in their IT strategy and implementation.