Communications of the ACM
Ten Disaster Preparedness Questions to Ask Your Cloud Services Provider
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Amazon Web Services recent storm-related outage, which left some websites inaccessible, is just the latest in a string of costly cloud failures. Since 2007, a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 major cloud services providers had an economic impact of $71.7 million dollars, according to the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency. The average availability rate of 99.9 percent is well below the required reliability for mission critical systems, IWGCR says.
While the typical cloud contract contains uptime clauses and credits for missed service levels, it often fails to adequately protect the enterprise customer. Service-level agreement credits "do not compensate for business losses associated with the downtime of a production application," says Kevin C. Taylor of law firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis. "Even in an extreme case of sustained and severe outages the credit amounts will be derisory . . . in comparison to the business impact to the customer, which could potentially be in the millions."
But there are questions the intelligent customer can ask to make sure they are sheltered from potential storms in the cloud.
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