The Cost of a Cloud Outage

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Simon Withers.

The past year has been a difficult time for cloud computing. While the technology went some way towards gaining mainstream acceptance much of the talk focused on the numerous high profile outages which affected many businesses and countless customers. Too many high profile businesses have had their reputations affected following prolonged cloud outages. Unsurprising then that the availability and security of mission critical data stored within the cloud has been called into question.

Some of the most reliable organisations such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft have suffered cloud outages, each affecting thousands of businesses who were unable to access their data or service their customers. To provide a financial perspective on the issue, a 49 minute outage suffered by Amazon.com last year cost the business more than $4m in lost sales. The figure is staggering; even more so when you consider that it fails to account for the loss of future sales as fickle customers take their business to rival firms. Research from Microsoft has found that half of organisations believe that data accounts for up to 75 per cent of their total value. If a business can’t access its data then it can’t serve its customers…

And as we’ve seen over the past year, downtime which affects business can destroy the trust and relationship between organisations and their customers. Though it’s the major outages that have hit the front pages in the last year, even the smaller outages can have a huge knock-on effect. If a business suffers a short outage and is unable to fulfil a customer’s order or loses their data the damage to that relationship can take months or even years to fix. When an outage can be so costly to a business’ reputation as well as their revenues it’s no surprise that CIOs are approaching the cloud with caution…

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/cost-cloud-outage-0925420#7eOoQVbFec3CYmbK.99