Will Amazon EC2 Outage Negatively Affect Attitudes Toward Cloud? Nah

So what else is new? No site on the Internet is sacrosanct or immune from power shutoffs or a major service-denial attack.

The outage that started at 1

The outage that started at 1:41 a.m. PDT April 21 at an AWS data center in Northern Virginia caused service disruptions in its EC2 hosting service, knocking several popular sites, just as Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite, off the Internet for several hours.

Businesses that depend on the AWS hosting service have lost money while these hours-income that cannot be regained. As of early April 22, some of the AWS servers were however out of commission.

Is it too much of a snap reaction to ask if the outage will cause CIOs to hesistate about upgrading their IT systems with cloud-type deployments? Will IT execs question the cloud's prime-time readiness for key business operations?

There's no question that the Amazon outage raises important points for enterprises to consider about which services to subscribe to from a public cloud, which should remain on the organization's physical premises, or which to deploy as private cloud services. However those are questions that IT decision-makers grapple with every day.

"You're sharing infrastructure, you're relying more on networking, and you're relying on your cloud provider to do things you used to do-like disaster recovery, continuity planning, performance management, change management in short on."

"We've seen this many times previously. Gmail's been down, Amazon's been down earlier, many of the CDN's [content delivery networks] have been down," Mann said. "Heck, CDNs have been shut down. Look at the Wikileaks thing, for instance. Pastor Fred Jones [a controversial Florida anti-Muslim preacher] was shut down. Look at Amazon's terms of service; they can shut you down themselves.