A recent article from tech news source CRN outlined the ten biggest cloud outages of 2012.
Familiar faces like Salesforce.com and GoDaddy made the list. (GoDaddy’s outage shook them up enough to chase them out of the cloud business altogether.) Google made the list twice, and Amazon made three appearances. Microsoft was the belle of the ball with four significant outages—two in its Azure cloud, two via Office365.
I suspect most “tenants” in these clouds have taken to thinking regular downtime is just something they’ll have to live with. After all, if the “big guys” can’t avoid it, who can?
Ironically, that matches the thinking of small business owners who have traditionally relied on one- or two-person IT shops for support. I was talking to one this week who lost his network for 36 hours at the end of his fiscal year, in the middle of negotiating a $4 million deal. Even though he was able to salvage the transaction, he’s still recovering from the embarrassment of having to tell his customers (and investors) that he had no way of reading their email. None. Nada. Zip.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
An IT partner large enough to build an engineering team with significant knowledge and expertise would never let a client go dark for that long. An IT partner flexible enough to deploy (and manage) fully redundant private, public, and hybrid clouds would never leave their customers 100% at the mercy of one of the big guys. And an IT partner personal enough to understand what technology means to each client’s business would never neglect the all-important redundancy aspect of business continuity.
–Michael Gavaghen
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