It was about a year ago at a high level presentation in San Francisco, one speaker opened his high level presentation with a simple message. “You are screwed,” he told the crowded gathering, and then went on to highlight a lengthy list of all that bad things that can happen in the cloud, from security breaches to major outages.
This speaker’s statement came to mind again recently when the news broke that Amazon suffered a widespread failure that took down many of their Internet services customers. The outage started April 21 and lasted almost four days. Amazon, who is on pace to generate a tidy $1 billion per year of revenue in providing cloud-based services, issued a public apology that included 10 days’ credit for any customers affected by the shutdown.
The cause of the outage was attributed to problems with network changes at one of Amazon’s huge data centers in Northern Virginia. Many of the smaller companies, like Seattle-based BigDoor, who were affected in the outage made a crucial mistake in designing their IT structure. They had backup and recovery services, but they were located in the same Amazon data center in Virginia.
Ok, class, what’s our lesson for today? All together now…..distribute the risk!
The 10 days’ credit may help soften the blow for Amazon customers who went dark for a lengthy period of time, but it probably won’t make up for lost business or, more importantly, customer confidence. In the aftermath, this has led a number of companies to purchase business interruption insurance and seek secondary cloud providers as backup.
The irony here is that while the Amazon debacle has gained major press attention, the growth of business in the cloud is beginning to transform whole industries. At the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) conference in Las Vegas last month, there were a number of smaller broadcasters who were building their business model around the delivery of TV content through the cloud.
Right there on the show floor, Uday Reddy, founder and CEO of Global Takeoff, flicked on a TV and showed a live feed of a newscast from India. No satellite. No cable. Just cloud.
It’s hard to underestimate the impact this expanding technology will have going forward. But we all need to be prepared for the up and down roller coaster ride that lies ahead and accept the risk accordingly.
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