Mitigating the risk of cloud services failure

The two-day outage may not slow the long-term growth of cloud computing significantly, however it should cause IT decision makers to take pause. Earlier rushing into any new cloud infrastructure deal, take the following seven steps to mitigate the risk of infrastructure-as-a-service failure.

If you lack in-house capabilities, ask your provider for help, or consider hiring consultants to create a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. "Even a small investment in third-party risk oversight is worth the investment, if it helps negate a potential disaster after all of a long outage," Fersht says.

3. Test that plan. At the time test it again. "The cloud is the perfect place to test failures in a completely staged environment," says Donald Flood, vice president of engineering for Bizo, a business-to-business advertising network provider and Amazon Web Services customer. "You can easily create a staged environment that mirrors production and test your systems by killing running services and evaluating how your system performs pursuant to this agreement failure."

5. Reexamine your sourcing strategy. IT leaders have embraced multi-sourcing, however that model can make cloud continuity confusing. "The domino-effect ramifications of an outage are very complex to manage and resolve," says Fersht. For instance, as more services get built on top of cloud computing infrastructures, a seemingly isolated outage can have a domino effect, taking down many services or an entire application environment, he adds.

6. Don't be cheap. The ROI of redundancy investments skyrockets in cloud collapse scenarios. Many of the companies affected by Amazon's failure could not-or would not-pay to run parallel systems in the cloud. Major Amazon Web Services customer Netflix, in exchange, says it experienced no issues because its cloud computing model assumed one of the data centers in Amazon's four regions would go down. The company had "taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services' redundant cloud architecture," a Netflix spokesperson told The New York Times.

Critical data should be replicated across multiple availability zones and backed up or live replicated across regions; active servers should be distributed geographically, and there should be enough active capacity to shift locations should one data center implode, advises Thorsten Von Eicken, CTO and co-founder of cloud management vendor RightScale. "Clearly all this has costs, so each business needs to determine which costs are justified for each service being offered," he adds.