Cloud Computing Failures and the Impact on SMBs

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The cloud isn’t as reliable as some researchers would like it to be. New reserch found that cloud failures cost more than $70 million dollars over the past five years, along with more than 500 hours of downtime. This has a direct impact on enterprises, as well as SMBs.

Unreliable Cloud?

In an article featured in Computerworld, the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) indicated that there were a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007. This downtime sometimes lasted for days or even weeks, which affected millions of users, including smaller companies that implement cloud services. The downtime had an economic impact of more than $71.7 million.Cloud computing types…

The IWGCR calculated that the average availability rate of cloud computing is 99.9 percent, which is a big gap from the expected reliability of 99.999 percent. Their research and calculations are based on reported outages at services like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Paypal, among others. The article also notes that the figures of the economic impact of cloud outages at major services providers is probably underestimated due to the fact it was based on press reports, leaving room for missed outages not reported in the media.

Based on what IWGCR could gather, the average unavailability of cloud services is 7.5 hours per year. This is critical when you compare, for example, that the average unavailability for electricity in a city is less than 15 minutes per year.

Impact on SMBs

The bottom line is that cloud services appeal more and more to government agencies and global businesses, so it’s important that they are as reliable as they can be. This also directly affects SMBs, since smaller companies are looking to the cloud to buy enterprise-grade applications and the support they need that previously would have been inaccessible at an affordable price point. Today, many SMBs are looking beyond the SMB versions and working with the same ones enterprises have mastered and maintained.

For the SMB, the major benefit of cloud computing is that it keeps them out of the IT infrastructure business. SMBs are free to have Google and a slew of similar companies worry about time-consuming core applications. Being on the cloud frees smaller companies from this responsibility, enabling it to focus on higher value work as well as its core business and clients. SMBs know their business is often relying on the availability of the cloud at large enterprises.

The Future of Cloud Reliability

Research around cloud reliability is fairly new. IWGCR made a strong attempt to assess the availability landscape for those who use the cloud. The group says they will be able to assess cloud availability better once they adopt new methods for future research. Until then, this research is food for thought for SMBs. It shows that there is a thinning line between the IT needs of both small and large companies today, especially when it comes to the cloud.