The Risks Of Cloud Computing

How can your company avoid embarrassing mishaps like AWS’s recent crippling outage?
“The Cloud” might be compared to  oxygen. It keeps the internet breathing—you can’t see it or feel it, but it underpins nearly everything that happens online. A good reminder of the importance of the cloud occurred recently when Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading cloud computing sources online, experienced an outage which affected millions of individuals’ and companies’ internet services.

Human Error

However, the outage wasn’t caused by a hacker or nefarious actor, but rather, by human error. In a rather long description that Amazon posted online, they explained the source of the problem. As Mashable reported, “the trouble began when an employee, who was conducting routine maintenance, mistakenly entered the wrong command while trying to take ‘a small number of servers’ offline. Instead, that command took down ‘a larger set of servers,’ including those that support two S3 subsystems. S3 is a data storage service used by a number of web-based services. The removal of these two, much larger systems, is what knocked so many services offline, including the ones necessary for Amazon to update its own status page.”
It’s certainly embarrassing for a company such as Amazon to admit to such an avoidable error, but this is not the story that should be focused on in this situation. Instead, the incident brings to light the fact that our online infrastructure isn’t nearly as resilient as we think it is. While Amazon reports that it has taken new steps to prevent something like this from happening again in the future, it is also necessary to critically evaluate how we’re operating on the cloud system. While it’s certainly convenient for many businesses to move their operations to the cloud, is it the most prudent step to rely on it completely?

Public and/or Private

While AWS is the leading provider of cloud computing, there are other players in the game including Microsoft ‘s Azure, IBM, Google and Rackspace. In many ways, these public cloud services have majorly streamlined workflows and are ideal for using software like Salesforce.com, Workday or Microsoft Office. However, it’s becoming clear that the most prudent approach is for a company to also possess a private cloud. The most pressing reasons for keeping  some aspects of the business on a private cloud could include: data sensitivity, user experience and privacy or regulation.
Beyond the AWS outage, there are other major risks for keeping all your company’s data on the cloud. These include shared usage, authentication, and the ever-present possibility that the service you use could be hacked. As one expert wrote: “I believe that most public cloud vendors do a far better job securing data than their customers do. But you need to know where your cloud vendor stands and the measures it takes to mitigate risk as compared to what your company alone could provide.”

Find Balance in Storage

As Forbes wrote about the AWS incident, “outages like we see this week remind us that we need a balanced approach because some workloads might not be best served outside of your data-center… Hybrid IT, gives businesses a combination of their data centers, co-location and external cloud for hosting applications that could be traditional, virtualized, public cloud or private cloud.”

Test It Out

It’s true that this kind of hybrid environment requires a bit more accountability on the part of the companies. Deciding what information and data is safe to put on the public cloud and what is best kept “in-house” requires modelling as to what would happen during an outage based on the location and availability of data. And while it’s not necessary to move away from the cloud computing model completely there needs to be a change of thinking. Companies cannot see it as a sinecure and should  accept  that cloud computing can be significantly flawed as we saw with the AWS outage. Therefore, if you haven’t done so already your company cloud solutions reliance, needs and expectations require revision starting now.

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