What do the Amazon and Sony Playstation Network outages mean for cloud computing?
The Background: Cloud computing is a term used to describe applications and services that are offered over the Internet from various data centers located around the world. These data centers are collectively referred to as the “cloud.” Cloud computing effectively reduces a company’s cost for storing and operating software applications on its own premises. A number of businesses are actively using the cloud, such as Hotmail and Netflix.
The Big Story: As the popular gaming network remains inaccessible for a fifth straight day, analysts have started voicing concerns about the level of security on the cloud. The Sony Playstation Network outage – which coincided with a similar outage on Amazon’s Web Service that has affected a large number of users of websites such as Foursquare, Reddit and Quora – has sent shockwaves among cloud computing users, enthusiasts and enterprises that have been considering a move to cloud hosting platforms.
The impact of these outages has been enormous to say the least. Sony’s Playstation Network – its online service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles – boasts over 70 million registered users, all of whom have been affected. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) platforms used by Amazon host thousands of major web sites on the cloud, and outages mean that users are unable to access these sites or, for that matter, their personal data stored on these platforms. An outage of this proportion has the potential of putting companies out of business as crucial data can become inaccessible for an extended period of time, thus jeopardizing operations.
Some analysts believe this incident should serve as an early lesson for the industry as it underscores the need for backing up crucial data which is hosted on the cloud, or a contingency plan and resources to fall back on.
According to Matthew Eastwood, who is an analyst for the research firm IDC, this incident is a “wake-up call” for cloud computing – one that will force a conversation in the industry.
John Footen, author of Service-Oriented Media Enterprise: SOA, BPM, and Web Services in Professional Media Systems and a media technology consultant, believes that companies should treat their cloud like any other aspect of their IT infrastructure by planning appropriately for it.
Despite the outages, Footen believes that cloud computing still has a future, but there are lessons to be learned. For instance, even if a corporation, such as Sony, uses its own local system, it can still be vulnerable. This calls for the need to have strategies in place to cope with any eventuality and to have a backup plan, even if it means paying for a backup service, using multiple clouds with various vendors, or using a combination of private and public cloud.
As a result of this incident, corporations planning to move to the cloud have some work to do. They will need to examine the reliability of the platform as well as prioritize operations in terms of what needs to go on a cloud which is operated by third party vendors and what needs to remain inside their own data centers. It also highlights the need for redundancy which can be a life saver in such situations, as in the case of Netflix which uses Amazon but managed to remain online during the outage thanks to Amazon’s redundant cloud backup infrastructure.
Some argue that the recent setback suffered by Amazon and the Sony Playstation network should be taken as a learning experience and not as a threat which can bring the cloud computing industry, expected to grow to $55 billion by 2014 by some estimates, to its knees, though some businesses might think twice before entrusting their valuable data to the cloud.
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