Microsoft, Google Suffer Outages: Can You Trust the Cloud?

Definitely, there are certain benefits of using cloud services, but the cost of these benefits may be too high if you can’t rely on the cloud. So do you trust the cloud?

It’s not so much to the cloud itself – you really have to consider the number of dependencies between you and the cloud provider – this is something people seldom ever calculate into their equation. Sure we can trust the Cloud provider to have redundant Power Backups & Generators, but there are a number of components between you and the provider that are UN-accounted networks and outside of either party’s control.

I have to quote this:

“It is never okay to allow someone you don’t know to see or hold your confidential information, whether professional or personal.”

I think people always forget to compare local downtimes to cloud ones. How often does Google suffer an outage vs. how much business do you lose vs. how much accountability exists?

We work with cloud providers that start losing money if they go below a minimum level of uptime. Can your locally hosted infrastructure guarantee that – not really.

You can’t 100% trust anyone/thing. Neither the cloud, nor your local infrastructure, nor your own cell phone where you store all your data. The advantage that the cloud offsets though is multiple copies of data and better redundancies. This means that if you notice, even when Google suffers outages (small or big), you don’t lose email that was sent to you. 6 months ago Google suffered an outage where a percentage of users lost all their mails in their inboxes. In 48-72 hours, Google restored all of these from their backup infrastructure and continued delivering new mail.

I bring this up to you since most people never factor in the reliability of all related networks between you and the Cloud – it is a critical mistake to leave this out. I trust the cloud, but have less trust in what connects us and won’t keep applications that are critical to local operations on a cloud service utilizing networks that is harbor much less reliability which is out of our control. While cloud computing is great, it’s still a gamble to rely too much on it at this time. That is the dark secret.

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