Cloud has been marketed as one of the key advances in technology and every day we hear about new areas where cloud services are being utilized. Cloud is the bright shining star that is being leveraged for it’s elastic, on-demand, resource pooling capabilities. However there have been Cloud outages recently that have adversely impacted businesses. These outages highlight the risks of the Cloud and bring into focus that such risks need to be effectively managed. Cloud outages are like lightning in the Clouds, lightning can cause problems where it strikes and preparation is important to avoid damage.
This year Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Gmail, Google App Engine, Microsoft Office 365, Azure had outages that impacted businesses. During this holiday season, some Netflix subscribers were hit with an outage on Christmas Eve that was caused by Amazon cloud servers. Amazon tracked the issue to Elastic Load Balancing, that enables spreading traffic across many servers.The wasn’t good timing for the outage as subscribers were looking forward to watching movies during this period. Microsoft Azure storage had an outage during the holidays that impacted the management portal. Big Data services and providers have also reported access issues.