Coping With a Cloud Outage

Grazed from CIOInsight.  Author: Samuel Greengard.

In recent years, as organizations have embraced cloud computing, CIOs and other executives have witnessed significant gains. In many cases, their enterprises have boosted IT availability, reduced demands on internal infrastructure and notched productivity improvements along with cost savings. Last October, Gartner reported that cloud computing will emerge as the bulk of IT spend by 2016 and half of all cloud services will take a hybrid cloud approach by 2017.

But as more and more organizations drift into the cloud, one fact is perfectly clear: the risk of an outage or outright failure is real, and such an event could have significant repercussions during and after an event. Already, a number of high-profile cloud providers have endured episodic outages and failures, including Amazon Web Services, Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Azure. In some instances, companies using these products and services haven’t just endured downtime, they’ve also lost data…


"There’s a fairly high degree of certainty that at some point an outage will occur," says Jay Heiser, a research vice president at Gartner. "Any business using the cloud must ensure that a contingency plan is in place," he says. This encompasses everything from a short-term outage to a cloud provider exiting the business. "It’s not enough to make sure that all data is backed up," says Heiser. "It’s critical to have a way to get to it and redeploy it. Otherwise, a company might find its own business at risk."…

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