How Much do Downtime Cost Businesses?

After the Amazon servers crashed last week that took thousands of businesses and users down, many are wondering how to optimize this dependence on cloud providers and how much downtime costs them.

Last week, millions of businesses and users were affected by the interruption for several hours of AWS servers in Virginia, United States. This fall caused applications and websites hosted in its cloud to be out of service.

As AWS discusses how to improve its cloud architecture internally, in a week that will undoubtedly be one of the talking points at its re: Invent 2020, customers will need to reflect on the investments they make to protect their businesses from future disruptions. and downtime.

And the thing is, AWS is the most important cloud service provider worldwide, with around 33% of the market share and surpassing Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

THE AWS RULING EXPOSED THE DEPENDENCE ON THE CLOUD PLATFORM FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY

However, a small capacity addition to Amazon Kinesis, the platform responsible for real-time processing of streaming data, caused an outage in the AWS US-EAST-1 region leaving thousands of businesses and users without access to some services..

The Kinesis outage caused all servers to exceed what the operating system settings could handle. The bug exposed AWS internal interdependencies and pervasive reliance on the cloud platform for business continuity.

But what did this service outage mean for many businesses?

Backup investment

Undoubtedly, many have rethought the technological dependence of a global provider and its public cloud and what it entails, since a failure in its infrastructure can lead to huge economic and reputational losses for many companies.

Cloud experts and analysts also point to the importance of reconsidering investments in backup cloud and data storage products. Therefore, the interdependence of IT and cloud computing is something that must be taken into account when designing the IT architecture, how to approach disaster recovery and business continuity.

Companies concerned about business continuity in the wake of an outage like AWS could host workloads across multiple clouds or regions. Data on multiple platforms virtually guarantees access if a cloud experiences downtime.

If organizations standardize applications so that they can deploy services and data across multiple cloud providers, the failure of one would have no impact on their level of service.

UNDERSTANDING THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT IN MULTIPLE VENDORS AND DATA DUPLICATION WILL BE KEY

Also, a complete duplication of data from one region to another allows businesses to access even in the middle of an outage, although the cost may be out of reach for many, although this additional expense can be seen as insurance.

Understanding the return on these investments can help organizations understand how much risk the current interdependence of cloud providers represents, which can improve the availability of services and an organization’s risk posture. However, as Forrester points out, planning for application outages will always be a responsibility that will fall on the company because vendors cannot guarantee 100% availability.