Cloud Outages Show CIOs Still at Vendors' Mercy

Some CIOs may face renewed questions about their cloud adoption strategies in the wake of Amazon.com’s so then-publicized service disruption Friday night, the result of severe thunderstorms Friday night, and the outage that affected clients of Salesforce.com Thursday, the result of a glitch affecting communications between Salesforce.com’s storage and database systems.

The benefits of cloud computing

Irrespective of the benefits of cloud computing, which allows companies to shift the capital expenditure and labor costs of managing software and computing infrastructure to external providers, many CIOs are as well questioning how cloud vendors communicate with them while service interruptions.

Phil Wainewright, an independent cloud computing analyst, said the lack of visibility and control is the tradeoff CIOs make for having vendors with superior knowledge of the software managing their research. “Outages happen to all businesses, and I think cloud providers have the expertise, skills and investment to minimize the problems,” Wainewright said. Wainewright as well pointed out that cloud computing vendors just as Salesforce.com don’t frequently suffer outages, and when they do, they take care of the problem or rather quickly.