This latest outage will do little to calm the nerves of BPOS customers who have suffered a series of service failures due to various reasons from late last year onwards. Microsoft no longer sells BPOS and is trying to migrate customers over to Office 365, which it believes is more robust. However, if the power supply goes down it doesn’t matter which version customers are accessing. To be fair there are some things that Microsoft and other providers do not have control over. They can do something about failover and mirrored data centres however, and the immediate question is why was there no such backup in place.
This latest problem will also fire off wider questions about the viability of the cloud as a delivery platform. The questions are valid, indeed necessary, as they are part of the ongoing process of improving the whole cloud operation. Outages are not a sign that cloud does not work however.
While not belittling the problem - TechMarketView is almost entirely a cloud-based business and Microsoft online services is central to our operations so we truly understand the impact – part of the problem is perception. Cloud is perceived as an always on service (like power, gas, water) and when a perceived always on service goes down our reactions are more extreme than when something that is expected to fail does fail. The 99.99% availability SLA’s that are critical to “selling” cloud services reinforce the always on perception – but no provider promises 100% uptime or ever will do.
The other problem is lack of control. Scheduled downtimes are accepted but when the unexpected occurs all customers can do is scan the wires and hope that someone, somewhere, is fixing the problem and that information will flow and service restoration is imminent.
In-house provided services fail too, the difference is that IT departments feel like they have some control because they can actively work on the problem. Before making a cloud decision, organisations need to do the work to calculate how much downtime (scheduled and unexpected) they experience with their internal systems compared to that of cloud-based services, and how much they are prepared to pay to increase the availability rate. It is also important to assess when outages tend to occur (during the business day, during peak business periods, during financial closing periods etc.), how long they typically last and what impact that has on business operations. This is good business practice and the new outages do not change the need for this type of assessment.
Outages will not go away. The onus is on service providers to react quickly in terms of providing status updates – using social media where its own service has failed - and getting everything online again. There is also a need to address business contingency on behalf of customers through the use of backup and mirrored facilities. That costs but it is a necessary cost and underlines the need for a web of alliances between application providers and cloud service and infrastructure providers to allow switching in the event of a failure.