Under A Cloud

Your work may have been derailed lately by some of the worldwide systems outages we’ve experienced. For much of the population, the last week of October was an alarming reminder of how much of our daily lives rely on the same few utilities and are susceptible to large-scale failure when one company goes down.

Today’s blog post will provide a quick recap of what happened, an explanation of how these dominoes fall, and some advice on how to make your business more resilient in the future.

Monday, October 20th: Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffers a major outage. They provide the underpinning for a multitude of platforms, including Slack, Facebook, Venmo, Reddit, Fortnite, and Snapchat.

Wednesday, October 29th: Microsoft’s Azure service suffered a similar outage, bringing down its widely used 365 suite and hobbling large organizations, including London’s Heathrow Airport, Alaska Airlines, and Xbox.

How can two outages bring down so many disparate businesses? CNBC’s reporting states, “AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter. Azure is second at 23%, followed by Google’s cloud unit at 10%.” In a word: monopolies.

Cloud services like AWS and Azure present themselves as the solution to all workflow problems. Let your employees access their information anytime, from anywhere. Use your laptop, desktop, or cell phone. Never misplace another document. Have everything at your fingertips, always.

Outages like these give us reason to doubt their claims. Every solution has its own pros and cons. For the pro, that is the ease and accessibility of cloud services, we are seeing a con play out on a major scale.

Reading a synopsis like that can give a small business owner the shivers. If these services can disrupt somewhere as large as Heathrow, how can I expect to protect my company? We have some suggestions!

1. Keep an eye on your services!
   Have you noticed more downtime than you expected? There may be a solution available for that particular service that can be hosted locally. Make a note internally or keep an eye on downdetector.com and pay attention to any troubling patterns that emerge.
2. Back up your mission-critical data onsite.
   Even if cloud services didn’t experience outages, there is still value in keeping your important data close to home. Hacks, lost passwords, and disgruntled employees can all present threats. A local copy will give you peace of mind. 
3. Consider investing in local tools.
   If your company relies on certain documents or systems to function, there can be a benefit to keeping a copy on a local machine. Even if you eventually have to reconcile these systems once everything is back online, you will still be able to function while the cloud is offline.

The question is not if outages will come again, but when. If you want to make your company as resilient as possible, give us a call and we’ll help you develop a customized plan.