Late last week some of Salesforce.com and Amazon’s cloud services in the US
were hit by outages. Electrical storms took Amazon down, for Salesforce.com it was a technical issue that scuppered the link between its storage and database systems. Outages are a fact of IT life, the question is how they are handled when they occur.
The interesting aspect of these latest problems was that the post mortem did not focus on so much on why the services went down or question the viability of the cloud approach but on the type and level of alerting. Both companies provide online status updates but they are being called on to provide more e.g. integration with enterprise system monitoring and alerting systems. It is a big ask and we’re not sure to what extent providers would be happy to have customers’ tools touching the innards of their systems, but it is a welcome sign of budding maturity. It is a call for more frequent and proactive (pushed not pulled) communications when systems are down, that providers ignore at their peril.
Meanwhile cloud momentum continues elsewhere, from Microsoft’s integrated PaaS/IaaS push (see Microsoft pushes into integrated IaaS/PaaS with Azure updates), to the expected endorsement of cloud computing by the European Commission panel on privacy (the Article 29 Working Party). It is expected to pronounce the concept of cloud computing as legal under European privacy law and to recommend that large enterprises monitor themselves to ensure that information stored in remote locations is protected. The recommendation will form part of a broader set of guidelines on cloud computing that should ease concerns over data storage and privacy issues and therefore encourage further cloud adoption.