The greater your reliance on cloud services, the more likely you are to experience downtime and revenue losses as a result of a cloud outage. Over 60% of enterprises that use the public cloud reported losses due to these accidents in 2022, indicating that outages are not a rare occurrence.
But are outages reason enough to abandon the cloud? Should you continue to use this infrastructure despite the risk of occasional downtime?
This article will teach you all there is to know about cloud outages. We explore eye-opening statistics, show how to limit the impact of cloud downtime, and look at the most significant outages in recent years.
Causes Of Cloud Outage
Cloud outages are triggered by a variety of circumstances. A specific piece of malware brought down some critical systems, or a DDoS attack overloaded your servers. Cloud outages can potentially be considered a type of cybercrime, which is becoming a more common cause of unexpected data centres downtown. However, like with other IT systems, the most prevalent hardware-based cause of cloud disruptions is a power outage. This can include, among other things, hardware failure, network outage, and power outage.
Other common reasons for cloud outages are as follows:
- Natural disasters
- Cybersecurity threats (DDoS, hacking, harmful viruses, etc.)
- Human error
- Application defects
- Architecture that is poorly planned
- The organisation’s inability to remain prepared for failure.
Preparing For An Outage
A CIO can swiftly assess cloud readiness and develop a transformation plan to avoid a cloud outage. They can also put up a team to architect, engineer, and support the implementation. In addition, the CIO can oversee tooling and cloud-native service due diligence, the adoption of agile methodologies and practices, and the enablement of DevOps and site reliability engineering. If you manage your own cloud, make sure your IT infrastructure is safe and has failover capabilities.
Identifying and selecting the correct cloud partners is also critical in avoiding interruptions. A cloud vendor outage will most likely only affect one site. Choose a different cloud location to mitigate the effects of an outage. When everything is running properly, the region closest to your users will perform better, but an alternative region offers you access to services in case of problems.
CIOs can take the following precautionary measures:
- Supervising the due diligence of tooling and cloud-native services
- Automating manual processes
- Disaster recovery (DR) plans and their execution
- Conducting DR drills for crucial applications
- Choosing an error budget
Check out the infographic below by ERS IT Solutions which takes a further look at ‘Cloud Outages’ and why they occur.
