What Risks Lie Behind the Cloud?
So Amazon's Web Service is going through some connectivity issues (read all about it here) that are affecting Web sites such as Reddit and Foursquare.
This is definitely a check in the 'con' section for those who are evaluating their cloud options. What we see here is that when things don't go so good up in that imaginary storage space in the sky, it can bring down the biggest of Web sites to their knees.
What if it was your enterprise's mission-critical apps and storage hanging in the balance? That would put a swift halt to the work day. And the worst part of this as an IT pro: What could you do about it? You would be at the complete mercy of your service provider to get you back up and running.
While I don't see Amazon's temporary outage as the death of the cloud, it does seem to give us pause to look at the technology with a critical eye. Rachel Dines at Forrester put it best in a recent blog entry: "When you use a cloud service, whether you are consuming an application (backup, CRM, email, etc), or just using raw compute or storage, how is that data being protected? A lot of companies assume that the provider is doing regular backups, storing data in geographically redundant locations or even have a hot site somewhere with a copy of your data. Here's a hint: ASSUME NOTHING. Your cloud provider isn't in charge of your disaster recovery plan, YOU ARE!"
How is the recent Amazon outage affecting your cloud strategy? Let Doug know at [email protected]. Also check out what a Redditer feels is bad advertising timing for Amazon.
-- By Chris Paoli
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/22/2011 at 1:18 PM