Cloudbursts ahead
March 25, 2013
Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Bart Perkins.
Moving to the cloud may reduce infrastructure costs and headaches, but clouds have their shortcomings. When they rain, millions can quickly become drenched. In the past year, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other providers experienced problems, from minor disruptions to major outages. A June 2012 headline captured the fallout: "Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down."
The service interruptions experienced by those companies and others disappointed countless consumers, but it was worse than a disappointment for the businesses themselves. They had come to depend heavily on cloud reliability; when the cloud services they had put their trust in failed, it was as if they had ceased to exist. All the outages were temporary, of course, but revenues were lost during the downtime, and afterwards customers wrote blog posts expressing everything from disappointment to anger, with some proclaiming that they would take their business elsewhere. Organizations that depend on cloud services need to manage four areas to help ensure that their dependence isn’t a liability:…
• Providers. Ideally, a cloud provider should be managed, monitored and measured like other critical IT suppliers. It is naive to take an "out of sight, out of mind" approach with cloud providers. Begin by setting clear performance goals with well-defined metrics. Assign staff to monitor performance and manage the supplier relationship.
• Resiliency. All cloud providers suffer periodic service degradation and occasional full outages. Unfortunately, restoration of normal service may not be fast enough to meet your business needs. On its blog, Netflix says, "It is still early days for cloud innovation, and there is certainly more to do in terms of building resiliency in the cloud." The blog describes the steps Netflix is taking to improve resiliency within Amazon’s cloud…
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