The Cloud’s Down! What Do We Do?!?
About six weeks ago I made an appointment to get the oil changed on my car one Saturday morning. I showed up right on time with my smartphone confirmation number in hand, only to be told that the computer system was down, and thus, they couldn’t change my car’s oil.
Changing a car’s oil takes exactly three things. A mechanic, the car, and the oil. It’s been done by generations of Americans on their backs in their driveways long before anyone ever heard of a computer. Yet here I was being told that the job that absolutely does not require a computer to do was impossible to do because there was no operational computer system.
Short of a natural disaster, no company should ever be unable to function because of an outage. As more and more small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make the transition to digital technology and life on the cloud, they often develop a false sense of security that their days of worrying about downtime and outages are behind them.
What To Do When Clouds Darken?
While the big players in cloud environments are exceptionally reliable, anything that’s manmade is inherently capable of having flaws and failing. That includes cloud hosting environments, which is why they all brag about 99.99% uptime rather than 100%. There’s always the element of chance at play.
Transitioning your critical systems, data storage, and back-end processes to the cloud is a smart investment in most cases, but it doesn’t guarantee your IT worries are now officially over. In 2020, Google, Azure (Microsoft), and IBM all suffered stunning failures of service to their cloud environments. Google’s cloud, Gmail included, was down for six hours, an eternity in the Internet service industry. Microsoft failed for five hours about a month later, including the loss of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
IBM’s downfall was a worldwide catastrophe to the point that even the company’s own status page wouldn’t load. Depending on what your company does and how big it is, downtime costs well into six figures per hour when you figure in the business lost, continuing to pay your employees their salaries while they can’t actually do any work, and all of the other latent costs of running an organization.
So what do we do to avoid having our businesses stagger around like Redd Foxx faking a heart attack on “Sanford and Son” when an outage comes along?
We plan. We prepare. We back up.
We plan by getting to know our cloud service provider’s most intimate points - namely, what their security looks like and what precautions they have in place for outages. Most big cloud environments are dealing with would-be attackers all the time, not just the grand concerted efforts you see in Hollywood movies. Are they prepared or not?
We prepare by figuring out what apps we use that are the most essential to our workflow and come up with alternatives to them that can be used in a pinch; even if it means going manual and doing everything by hand; working longer and slower is vastly superior to not working at all. We also don’t put all of our eggs in one virtual basket, but rather distribute our digital assets to several different cloud providers. It’s the same argument as diversifying your financial portfolio so you don’t get Enron-ed one day out of the blue.
We back up by remembering that the cloud isn’t flawless and that there’s nothing wrong with using on-premises storage facilities as your failsafe to the unexpected. Keeping your most important assets close to the vest in an emergency is just good business.
Life in the cloud has a lot of positives, but it’s not perfect beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you need help with your cloud strategy, reach out to Technolene for a consultation.
