In recent years, an increasing number of companies have migrated to the Cloud for cost-saving reasons, but today, we got a painful reminder of the limitations and risks associated with doing that.
Amazon’s cloud-based service, AWS, suffered an outage that is impacting a number of people who rely on the service, including, but not limited to:
• Trello
• Quora
• IFTTT
• Wix
• Alexa
• GroupMe
• Nest (Google’s thermostat control app)
• And others
In a bitter irony, the website isitdownrightnow.com relies on the service, and was unavailable.
As of the writing of this article, Trello users report having spotty success with getting the page to load, although even when successful, not all assets on the page load. So, users are not recommended to try to perform any critical work using the system.
Amazon has not released any information on what caused the outage. They have just made it clear that they are aware of the problem and actively working to resolve it.
That brings us back to the topic of risk.
Back in the old days, before the cloud, if a company’s server went down, it impacted that company and slowed down their immediate suppliers, but the ripple effect stopped there.
These days, with so many companies using cloud-based services, if one of the providers goes down, it can cause an outage that shuts down significant segments of the internet.
This is not a reason to rethink reliance on cloud-based services, but rather, an acknowledgement that a proper risk assessment needs to be performed. Reliable backup plans must be in place to deal with the eventuality that a critical cloud-based service may go down unexpectedly.
In the modern business world, speed is life, and few things are worse than to go from warp speed to a standstill in the blink of an eye, and be powerless to do anything about it.
Take steps to make sure you never find yourself in that situation. If you’re not sure how to proceed, call us today and speak with one of our knowledgeable team members. We’ll assess your current situation and the risks associated with it, and work with you to draft a backup plan for greater peace of mind.
