Cloud Computing and Reliability

by   |  2 min read
Published :

Just when every business pundit thought that cloud computing was ready to take over the IT landscape, a spanner has been thrown in the works. If the Amazon EC2 cloud’s outage last year bewildered many, this year’s downtime of one of the reputed software company has deepened the doubts. The service was down for over ten hours - a duration most businesses consider inadmissible. This definitely has shaken the confidence in cloud computing, and businesses are asking questions about its reliability.

The fail-proof cloud?

With the massive amounts of investments being made in cloud computing, it only makes sense to expect the perfect system. After all, cloud computing has several layers of redundancy built in to avoid these types of outages. But consider this: which IT system is truly fail-proof? When it comes to designing real-world systems, almost anything can go wrong with an architecture, no matter how robust it is. That means no matter how much cloud computing or any other technology grows, there will always be these unwanted moments.

A final look

But these analyses don’t cast a grim shadow over the future of cloud computing. In terms of performance and uptime, cloud computing continues to beat on-premise data centers by a mile. As more players enter the market, storage and network costs are going to fall, making it even more viable to move to the cloud. However, it does call for the role of third-part vendors for providing accurate bench marking results about cloud service providers. As the recent outages have shown, the vendors can’t be taken on their word.