Even global cloud services providers experience outages. In fact, it is pretty clear that ‘Always On’ doesn’t always mean what it says.
What happened recently?
In early December, and not for the first time, Amazon’s cloud network was down for over five hours. The outage exposed the level of dependency millions of businesses have on Amazon Web Services.
While most impact from the issue hit the eastern seaboard of the US, many UK firms were also impacted.
During the period of interruption, Amazon’s communications were minimal, with only a brief statement and update on the AWS console acknowledging the problem was being addressed.
What are the implications for UK businesses?
For many companies in the UK, this meant at least five hours’ downtime. In addition, resources were also needed to check local systems and reactivate services.
The problem was more acute for many firms, as this drop in business operations took place in their busiest trading period of the year.
While there are many benefits available to businesses moving their data and operations to cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google, cloud migrations need to be planned in detail.
Instances of downtime can create real or perceived views that cloud infrastructure is ‘Always On’ and ready to handle data from applications previously hosted in physical data centres.
How can ORIIUM help?
We help customers with their journey to or within Public Cloud platforms, enabling them to transform their services, migrate their data and ensure efficient platform usage.
Given that businesses often fail to consider the support and management overhead needed for services such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, the burden on internal IT resource can negatively impact the service provision and uptime.
ORIIUM enable businesses to achieve successful transformation and migration to platforms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure by providing value-add consultancy services. With this additional layer of support and expertise, organisations can guard against downtime and ensure optimal business resilience – even during periods of downtime from the major cloud hosting providers.
Find out more
Guard against AWS or Azure outages today – call us to discuss the benefits of protecting your public cloud environment to ORIIUM’s private cloud.
