Microsoft’s very public outage this weekend of their Cloud environment highlights the potential fragility of ‘the cloud’ and the increasing dependence on it for many companies.
For so long, many bigger businesses chased the ‘five nines’ – the 99.999% uptime that a fully replicated Enterprise infrastructure could offer a business. In case you could not be bothered to do the math, 99.999% allows for five and a quarter minutes of unplanned downtime per annum. Not much at all. According to the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455) the Microsoft Cloud was offline for two and half hours and potentially resulted in 100 million people being unable to access their applications. In any major corporation that would be totally unacceptable and the business disruption / potential losses unthinkable.
It makes me wonder why Enterprise clients would ever surrender the surety that controlling their own environment must give them. I know that some widely deployed systems may suit the Cloud, and I know that all the major infrastructure brands, including IBM and HP, have some very compelling cloud solutions – but I think it will be some time (never?) before certain types business can contemplate the cloud as a suitable place for all applications.
That being the case, I am confident that well designed, redundant Enterprise infrastructure will remain vital to UK business’ of all sizes for many years to come, and that Applied Technologies can continue to provide important advice on the subject.
Don’t misunderstand me though. I see the value in the Cloud and Applied are perfectly place to work with IBM, HP and others to help any customer with Cloud aspirations – I just believe that I, and the team, will continue to provide a balanced view on this subject as the Cloud matures and comes of age.
To talk about the cloud, or your infrastructure project, contact Applied Technologies:
https://applied-tech.development-box.co.uk
www/applied-tech.co.uk/blog
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