What have we learned from the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure outages?

Chuck Dubuque, VP Product Marketing, Tintri explains "the Azure service disruption last week once again showed that even Tier 1 public cloud services are not immune to power outages and command line typos". He goes on to say "Public cloud has come a long way, however it is not a fit for all workloads, as some may be better suited to on-premises enterprise cloud. If nothing else, the recent Azure and S3 issues will cause some businesses to reconsider a multi-cloud strategy including on-premises enterprise cloud to reduce their risks."  

Have a disaster recovery plan in place

There is no doubt that the rise of public cloud brings with it many benefits, but the recent downtime of AWS and Azure proves that it is not invincible. When evaluating how to implement a cloud strategy, explore private cloud, a multi-cloud strategy and always have a mitigation and recovery plan in place in case of any outage. The cloud is not one size fits all, so find the right fit for your company.

"Two weeks ago an S3 outage took AWS offline impacting millions of customers. This week another, seemingly impenetrable behemoth player, Microsoft, had to announce storage issues were impacting its Azure public cloud. Although Microsoft was able to quickly, well within eight hours, resolve the issue, the headline making outages of both Azure and AWS reaffirm the fact that the public cloud is, in fact, still vulnerable," said Jennifer Gill, Director, Global Product Marketing, Zerto. "IT professionals need to protect their organizations should something like this happen again. ‘IT resilience,’ the ability to respond to an IT disruption so quickly that end-users and customers are not aware it occurred is crucial. This is possible through a combination of efforts including leveraging replication to multiple targets, both on-premises and cloud, to create a hybrid cloud environment where infrastructure ‘eggs’ are not all in ‘one basket.’ Implementing these precautionary measures ensure that outages on one platform are mitigated and no company can be taken down due to its reliance on a single public cloud alone."

Private Cloud – less risk, same reward

According to Victoria Grey, CMO, Nexsan, on-premises private cloud solutions offer many of the same benefits as public cloud as an option to combat downtime that is out of the control of a company’s IT team.