Few days ago when we had hosting issue, we wrote a piece, titled, Be Careful With Cloud Services – When Problems Hit, You Are Helpless.
Most people have since figured out that cloud based operations are good – savings in cost and outsourcing of IT operations, at least those ones in the cloud. But cloud operation also carries major risks.
Amazon cloud systems have proved many of us right. According to CNN, Amazon EC2 cloud product had some problems preventing some companies from operating at full capacities yesterday.
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A rare and major outage of Amazon’s cloud-based Web service on Thursday took down a plethora of other online sites, including Reddit, HootSuite, Foursquare and Quora.
The outages began Thursday morning just before 5 a.m. ET and were still ongoing more than 12 hours later. In a series of running updates on its Web services “Health Dashboard,” Amazon described its efforts to recover from the cascade of problems kicked off by an early-morning “networking event.”
Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) hosts many major websites on its web servers through a service called EC2. The “elastic” infrastructure model is designed to scale up automatically to handle giant traffic spikes — the kind Amazon gets every year during its December e-commerce rush.
The lesson is simple – do not give your business to the cloud. You must hold some parts internal- especially the most critical ones. You cannot afford for crises to come and you become powerless and resort to just calling a phone. Cloud is good, but it can take a business out of operations within hours. If you are a financial institution, build an internal backup that can keep you working in case there are some problems. You need to be in charge of your critical infrastructure, irrespective of the cost savings. Amazon has just educated us on the risk side of cloud today.
photo credit/ CNN