Downtime
Downtime is often cited as one of the biggest disadvantages of cloud computing. Since cloud computing systems are internet-based, service outages are always an unfortunate possibility and can occur for any reason.
Can your business afford the impacts of an outage or slowdown? An outage on Amazon Web Services in 2017 cost publicly traded companies up to $150 million dollars. Unfortunately, no organization is immune, especially when critical business processes cannot afford to be interrupted. In June and July of 2019, a whole slew of companies and services were hit by outages, including Cloudflare (a major web services provider), Google, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, Verizon, and Spectrum.
Best practices for minimizing planned downtime in a cloud environment
- Design services with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. Leverage the multi-availability zones provided by cloud vendors in your infrastructure.
- If your services have a low tolerance for failure, consider multi-region deployments with automated failover to ensure the best business continuity possible.
- Define and implement a disaster recovery plan in line with your business objectives that provide the lowest possible recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
- Consider implementing dedicated connectivity such as AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or Google Cloud’s Dedicated Interconnect or Partner Interconnect. These services provide a dedicated network connection between you and the cloud service point of presence. This can reduce exposure to the risk of business interruption from the public internet.
- Read the fine print on your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Are you guaranteed 99.9% uptime or even better? That 0.1% downtime equals about 45 minutes per month or around eight hours per year.