The Cloud is NOT Disasterproof – Are You

Over the weekend, Google suffered an outage that lasted about 4 hours. (See Google Appstatus Dashboard)

The good news is that the outage happened on a Sunday afternoon because that reduced the impact of the outage.   Next time it could happen on a Monday morning instead.

The outage took down virtually every Google service at some point during the outage.

But worse than that, it took down all of those companies that depended on one Google service or another.  Examples include Snapchat, Shopify, Discord and even a number of Apple services went down because Apple is not in the data center business.  iCloud mail and drive and iMessage were all affected.

This is not to beat up on Google.  Both Amazon and  Microsoft have had similar meltdowns and so have much smaller providers.

And they will again.  Human beings design computers, build computers and operate them.  And, after all, humans are, well, just human.

One more time, this is a lesson for users of cloud services.  

Maybe you can deal with a 4 hour outage on a Sunday.

But can you deal with an 8 hour or 24 hour outage on a Wednesday (like Microsoft had recently)?

What is the cost in lost productivity when users can’t get to their email or their office documents?

What is the impact to your customers if they can’t get to your service?  Will they move to a competitor?  And stay there?

I am not proposing any solution.  What I am proposing that you consider what the impact is of an outage like this.  Impact on both YOU and also on your CUSTOMER.

Then you need to consider what the business risk is of an inevitable outage and what your business continuity plan is.  Will your BC plan sufficiently mitigate the risk to a level that is acceptable to your company.

Finally, you need to look at your Vendor Cyber Risk Management program.  

Apple’s systems went down on Sunday NOT due anything Apple did, but rather something their vendor (Google) did.

At this point Google has not said what happened, but they said they will provide an after action report soon.  But, remember, this is not, ultimately, a Google problem, but rather a problem with cloud consolidation.  When there are only a handful of cloud providers hosting everything (3 tier one providers — Google, Microsoft and Amazon) and a slightly larger handful of tier two providers, if one of them burps, a lot of companies get indigestion.

Source: Vice 

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