04/12/2017

How to Avoid a Self-Inflicted Cloud Disaster

Practical steps companies can take to ensure their cloud services do not go down

When Amazon’s S3 cloud service suffered an outage at the end of February, it took down large parts of the internet that rely on Amazon’s platform. The culprit was human error: An Amazon employee debugging the S3 billing system made a typo, as Amazon explained.

The employee had intended to take a few servers offline, but too many servers were taken down, creating a cascading failure in which subsystems critical to S3’s operations went down. The subsystems then needed to be fully restarted, a process that took down many internet services with it.

Businesses rely increasingly on the cloud for critical business functions. If they are prepared, they also have disaster recovery solutions in place to prepare for external factors such as natural disasters or hacking. How can businesses avoid crucial cloud services being taken offline, and how can they mitigate a disaster that happens inside their cloud service provider?

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