The world’s largest cloud computing platform, Amazon Internet Providers (AWS), skilled a serious outage that has impacted hundreds of organisations, together with banks, monetary software program platforms reminiscent of Xero, and social media platforms reminiscent of Snapchat.
The outage started at roughly 6pm AEDT on Monday. It was brought on by a malfunction at considered one of AWS’ knowledge centres situated in Northern Virginia in the US. AWS says it has mounted the underlying challenge however some web customers are nonetheless reporting service disruptions.
This incident highlights the vulnerabilities of relying a lot on cloud computing – or “the cloud” because it’s typically known as. However there are methods to mitigate a number of the dangers.
Renting IT infrastructure
Cloud computing is the on-demand supply of numerous IT assets reminiscent of computing energy, database storage, and functions over the web. In easy phrases, it’s renting (not proudly owning) your personal IT infrastructure.
Cloud computing got here into prevalence with the dot com growth within the late Nineteen Nineties, whereby digital tech corporations began to ship software program over the web. As corporations reminiscent of Amazon matured in their very own capability to supply what’s often known as “software as a service” over the net, they began to supply others the flexibility to lease their digital servers for a value as effectively.
This was a profitable worth proposition. Cloud computing allows a pay-as-you-go mannequin just like a utility invoice, somewhat than the large upfront funding required to buy, function and handle your personal knowledge centre.
Consequently, the most recent statistics counsel greater than 94% of all enterprises use cloud-based providers in some kind.
The massive 3’s market domination
The worldwide cloud market is dominated by three corporations. AWS holds the biggest share (roughly 30%). It’s adopted by Microsoft Azure (about 20%) and Google Cloud Platform (about 13%).
All three service suppliers have had latest outages, considerably impacting digital service platforms. For instance, in 2024, a difficulty with third-party software program severely impacted Microsoft Azure, inflicting in depth operational failures for companies globally.
Google Cloud Platform additionally skilled a serious outage this yr attributable to an inside misconfiguration.
Profound dangers
The heavy reliance of the worldwide web on only a few main suppliers — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — creates profound dangers for each companies and on a regular basis customers.
First, this focus types a single level of failure. As seen within the newest AWS occasion, a easy configuration error in a single central system can set off a domino impact that immediately paralyses huge segments of the web.
Second, these suppliers typically impose vendor lock-in. Corporations discover it prohibitively tough and costly to change platforms attributable to advanced knowledge architectures and excessively excessive charges charged for transferring giant volumes of information out of the cloud (knowledge egress prices). This successfully traps clients, leaving them hostage to a single vendor’s phrases.
Lastly, the dominance of US-based cloud service suppliers introduces geopolitical and regulatory dangers. Knowledge saved in these huge techniques is topic to US legal guidelines and authorities calls for, which might complicate compliance with worldwide knowledge sovereignty rules reminiscent of Australia’s Privateness Act.
Moreover, these corporations maintain the ability to censor or prohibit entry to providers, giving them management over how corporations function.
The present greatest apply to mitigate these dangers is to undertake a multi-cloud strategy that lets you decentralise. This includes working important functions throughout a number of distributors to remove the only level of failure.
This strategy might be complemented by what’s often known as “edge computing”, whereby knowledge storage and processing is moved away from giant, central knowledge centres, towards smaller, distributed nodes (reminiscent of native servers) that corporations can management straight.
The mix of edge computing and a multi-cloud strategy enhances resilience, improves pace, and helps corporations meet strict knowledge regulatory necessities whereas avoiding dependence on any single entity.
Because the previous saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in a single basket.
Jongkil Jay Jeong, Senior Fellow, Faculty of Computing and Info System, The College of Melbourne
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