The cloud explosion has resulted in business in going overboard with moving their applications to the cloud. The cost effective, easy and manageable cloud services is the impetus required to switch to different cloud service providers.
As cloud services change the IT landscape, the risk of a cloud outage is keeping businesses from fully adopting the cloud. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and other cloud service providers have faced many times outages of their cloud services.
It happens to all – Get over it
This is the story of all the Cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon or Google. Like all IT services, there are days when technology can go wrong. It happens to all. Customers may complain and rant for a few days. As the issue is fixed, things are back to normal.
So how can you work around the inevitable cloud outage?
- Think about a multi cloud or hybrid cloud strategy
- Look for Cloud Service Providers that have multiple Availability Zones or locations
- Make sure that the Availability Zones or locations are independent of one another
- Design and deploy business critical applications across multiple regions/locations/zones
- Watch out for Single Points of Failures within Availability Zones/locations/regions
- Employ solid backup and recovery strategies
Take note of the Cloud providers SLAs
No service provider will guarantee 100% uptime through SLAs. This will never happen. It is very important to read and understand your cloud provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) as it helps you in understanding the technical and legal aspects of the service being offered. In case of failure of any service, you will have the clear idea about your cloud provider’s reach and you can avoid the disruptions.
Secure your cloud with planning
One of the major reasons why business face cloud outages, is lack of planning. They fail to understand their business needs, set unrealistic expectations from the providers and lack of proper training for their users.
When signing on a service provider, it’s important to understand your application’s design and the code redesign that needs to be implemented for cloud migration. Prior planning will overcome the possibilities of cloud outages or cloud based service disruptions.
Keep open communications
Communicate the cloud outage to your provider immediately, so that they can address the issue. Get timely status updates and determine what actions they are taking to resolve the problem. You need to communicate the same to all your stakeholders.
Don’t rely on only one cloud provider
Spread your computing capabilities employing a mix of public, private, hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure. This minimizes the risks involved during the cloud outages and allows to get back online with minimum data loss. Distribute your data across multiple locations.
Test your outage preparedness
Simulate a cloud outage to check your preparedness and monitor the results. Analyze it to learn the possible weak points and take necessary actions to mitigate the risks.
Design resiliency into applications
Most of the cloud providers offer advanced resiliency techniques into the design of the application itself, so that they can automatically switch to an alternate cloud in the event of an cloud wide outage.
Cloud outages are a part of your cloud architecture. With some prior planning and preparation, you can overcome this situation. Contact us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555