Limiting the effects of cloud computing outages

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Contrary to popular belief, cloud services actually fail more often than internal data center facilities do. The cloud isn’t inherently unreliable, but like all forms of IT, cloud services have to be selected carefully and managed to achieve specific reliability and availability goals. The steps can be contractual, technical or may even involve rethinking your application architectures. Without careful consideration, you may get less from your cloud services than you expected.

SLAs mitigate risk of using cloud providers’ data centers

Protecting against cloud outages starts by assessing the reliability of cloud providers’ data centers. The majority of cloud providers have a small number of data centers, often only one, and these data centers are subject to the same kinds of failures as an enterprise. The most publicized cloud failures occur when an entire cloud data center fails, usually because of a natural disaster. To protect yourself in case of failure, you’ll either have to ask for specific data center configuration information or obtain an availability guarantee from your provider…

For server, storage and network reliability, the best strategy is to negotiate a service-level agreement (SLA) specifying the availability guarantee and the time to restore service if it’s lost. It’s important to understand whether a cloud data center is located in an area where natural disasters like hurricanes or blizzards are common. Also find out if the data center has backup power and whether there’s a backup data center that can pick up the load…

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