The Risks of Public Clouds

If there was ever an example of why Public Cloud storage can be hazardous, it was Go Daddy’s service outage in 2012. Thousands (or millions – depending on who you ask) of domains were taken offline. Businesses not only lost their websites, a number of them lost access to their email. This lasted for 6 hours. Even Amazon who has an estimated 500,000 servers distributed around the globe for redundancy and disaster recovery protection is okay with being offline for over 4 hours a year (99.95% estimated uptime).

 

The cause of the GoDaddy incident is still under review. Hackers under the ‘Anonymous’ banner have claimed responsibility, but the company itself blames internal technical problems. Regardless of the reason, all agree that the outage dealt a massive blow to all of their clients.

 

The CEO of one Go Daddy customer, RunningShoes.com, told United Press International that the downtime had been “devastating” for his company, resulting in up to $50,000 in lost sales.

 

At times like these, it’s worth noting that smaller scale cloud providers, like Quartet, can be a perfect middle-of-the-road option for business. Large enough to deliver the capability, and small enough to have everything under control. Plus, we don’t outsource our call centre.

 

If you’re interested in taking up cloud computing (or switching providers), give us a call. We’ve recently invested in an IBM Pureflex data system, giving us one of the best storage facilities in the city.