By now, most people heard about Amazon’s cloud computing disaster which left countless websites and companies with tools supported by Amazon’s ….scrambling to get reconnected. Amazon’s (business unit) data center outage on the East coast caused the company the flex its crisis management capabilities. As people move more of their operations outside the perceived “safety
My colleague Jim recently wrote about the potential “risk and failure” for early adopters of any technology platform. Needless to say, other SaaS-like services have struggled with similar situations.
What you see above are the remnants of a really early draft of my thoughts for my blog from last week: Cloudy with a chance of pitfalls. Really early and rough. My trusty blog tool Blogger decided to allow me to both save and post a final draft of this blog, without apparent issue. And I even posted a link to Facebook which I tested, so I know it worked. That blog can currently be seen here. i.e., not at all. I’ve actually decided not to rewrite the blog, because apparently, even my friends didn’t want to tell me that my Facebook link was broken. Alternatively, people have tired of my rants…
The irony in all of this for me is that the premise of my blog was about recent outages/issues with significant players in the online world. First Amazon’s cloud takes down online retailers and sites like Foursquare, then Sony’s Playstation network security breach leaks millions of users’ personal data, and now a widespread outage at Google’s Blogger site erases prescient words from a technology consultant. (Obviously I’m still sensitive about the cloud eating my blog homework) I’m being facetious, but none of the aforementioned sites are engrained in my daily life. However, for some people they are.
As we become more reliant on internet services, and cloud base tools become more prevalent, consumers simply trust that these wonderful new services will work. I as a consumer would expect nothing less. Barring something like an act of God, or possibly war. Even a free service like Blogger is essential for some people to run a business. While Blogger starts to rebuild my trust, for the time being I plan to take a double secret back up of my blog before posting. And for those brave enough to rely on cloud based services to run your business, make sure you plan for those potential pitfalls.
