Cloud Outages Rattle Nerves

Cloud computing is playing a more important role in enterprises. By 2013, cloud services will comprise 10 percent of IT spending, according to IDC. The adoption rate could slow, however, over reliability and security issues. When Amazon Web Services experienced an outage last week, taking several major web sites down with it, concerns were once again heightened over the reliability of cloud services. 

Cloud outages of hosting companies are rare but nonetheless raise red flags for enterprises considering migrating business functions to a cloud computing environment. Following several high profile outages, service providers selling as-a-service technology need to provide added assurance of reliability and security.

The outage of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) cloud services was a public relations disaster due to the popularity of the web sites it took out. Sites affected included the popular social networking sites Pinterest, Reddit, Foursquare, Turntable.fm, Heroku, and GitHub. Down for most of Monday, the cloud hosts problems were tracked to on-demand storage elements in the Northern Virginia data center. In the social networking world, a service failure can go viral. Unable to occupy themselves rating posts on Reddit or pinning images to Pinterest, news of the outage quickly spread through online forums. Other recent outages of Amazon have gone viral, including a major blackout in July – which took out Netflix and Instagram – blamed on failed backup generators and storms at the same North Virginia facility.

Reliability is a key issue when deciding on whether to use cloud services, Michael Chui, a senior fellow at McKinsey & Co. told The Boston Globe following Amazon’s crash in July. The Amazons need to press for higher standards in reliability and security from cloud services. "[They] have the opportunity to shape the marketplace and make demands that make products better. They will push for improvements," says Chui.

The outages have created a trust issue between third party providers and the 84 percent of enterprises implementing, testing or pilot testing cloud services who were surveyed by IDG Enterprise and NTT Communications Corp. The concerns raised by Amazon’s cloud crashes are resulting in less business for third party cloud solutions providers. Companies are migrating to the cloud at a slower rate, handing over smaller pieces of their cloud strategy to third parties. At present, 31 percent of companies surveyed have chosen to evaluate cloud services on company-owned servers while 16 percent have no plans to use third party providers.  

Enterprises are even more concerned about security, and justifiably so. Businesses are experiencing more security breaches on cloud services than on traditional IT infrastructure, finds a survey by Intel, with 27 percent reporting at least one security breach. As a result of these security issues, 57 percent of those surveyed were not using cloud services.

Service providers could do much more to communicate how they are enhancing data protection. Evidently, companies are not being informed about security, according to 60 percent of respondents to a recent Ponemon Institute and Thales eSecurity survey, who say they are unaware of what measures cloud providers are taking to protect their data. Forty percent of companies surveyed feel they are less secure on the cloud. Both solution providers and cloud services need to make reliability and security enhancements, and importantly, communicate those improvements to enterprises. (CL) Link