Cloud computing is certainly attracting headlines in the media. You might have noticed Microsoft’s Cloud Power advertising blitz, or seen Apple’s Steve Jobs talking excitedly about iCloud. The trouble is that, for most companies, it’s hard to work out whether any of this hype is relevant to their business. So is the cloud an option for you? As it happens, it is likely that your company already uses a cloud-based solution. If you subscribe to […]
downtime
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One of the few sure things in the online world is Amazon.com. The site never seems to go down, despite the fact that it’s serving millions of customers every day. Yet even the mighty Amazon — or, more accurately, its cloud services unit, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — collapsed in April for about 24 hours, taking with it customers like Reddit, foursquare, Hootsuite and hundreds of other websites, some of them run by small businesses. […]
Two recent events reminded us this spring that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: everything fails, sooner or later. The failure modes of cloud vs. traditional data center architectures may differ in nature and frequency, but the threat is the same – outages, downtime, lost revenues and damaged customer trust. Ironically, these same recent events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually […]