Cloud Outages: Knowing The Real Cost

If you have any intention of moving to a public cloud, it is recommended to check how much you are risking at the stake of unavoidable cloud outages.

On January 31’13, Amazon.com experienced 49 minutes of outage, which directly resulted in more than $4 million sales loss. Those who were part of the effected group can understand how it really felt.

Network World’s Brandon Butler explained “Amazon officials have said the biggest customer of the company’s cloud division — AWS (Amazon Web Services) — is Amazon.com. AWS has experienced a variety of outages during the past three years, but usually the Amazon.com retail site is not impacted.”

For instance, EBS outage in October 2012 harmed comapnies like Reddit. Another incidence of outage was seen on Christmas Eve 2012 that caused trouble to Netflix, but the video streaming service offered by Amazon.com kept on working. However, on January 31, Amazon.com was itself the sufferer.

So, what do these outages mean in terms of money? Butler presented his take on the issue, “Amazon.com’s latest earnings report showed the company makes about $10.8 billion per quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9 million per hour.” Simply, an hour of outage costs about $5 million to Amazon.com.

The basic idea behind presenting these stats and facts is to show you a hidden side of public clouds. If you’re planning to move your information and work on any public cloud, make sure you know the drawbacks as well. You really got to know about the cost of creating SLAs and the right amount to invest in any cloud service.

Your nature of business shall decide the impact of cloud outages on your business. If you own a trading company, an hour of unavailability of cloud service can cost you as much as $1 million. Therefore, discuss this matter seriously with your cloud service provider and bring your decision in legal agreement file too.

Outages are literally inevitable whether you depend on a public cloud or save your data in a local data center. In fact, it is amusing; companies make so much fuss about cloud outages when their own internal systems are habitual of such incidents.

But it is still important to know how much it will cost you in case of a cloud outage. Your cloud provider must know about your concerns in terms of monetary loss, and it is ideal to know the estimated loss during an outage, especially when it is caused because of an internal fault. So, you should start working on this agenda, as soon as possible.