Vox pop: Do public cloud outages deter clients from moving?

Adrian Telfer, head of cloud and managed services, Interactive

Not typically. In fact, in-house infrastructure outages occur much more regularly than public cloud outages. Public cloud outages are publicly visible and highly scrutinised due to their often far-reaching impact. 

On the flipside, in-house outages are often played down, or blamed on a single component or vendor. The probability and impact of an outage to an individual business is typically far more severe when in-house environment disruption occurs. 

Regardless of whether it’s public cloud, private cloud or a managed cloud service, the benefit of having access to on-demand resources to service dynamic evolving workloads, and to deliver deep insights into business performance, cannot be underestimated. 
By putting infrastructure in the cloud, organisations can access constantly evolving technology and capabilities with engineers on hand to rapidly resolve problems.

Anthony Woodward, chief executive, Bulletproof

While public cloud outages happen from time to time, we don’t see these as a strong deterrent to take-up. In fact, we have continually seen a very strong take-up of services across a wide range of clients of various sizes and industry verticals. 

We have found that the significant business transformational value of migrating to the cloud is a strong driver. However, as with all IT service procurement, customers should understand their acceptable risk profile and the risk nature of their chosen cloud architecture and platform. 

Our customers partner with us to look after their interests in scoping, designing, implementing and supporting their cloud infrastructure for exactly this reason.

David Hanrahan, general manager of cloud services, Dimension Data Australia

Major public cloud outages are not deterring organisations from moving to the cloud, but when a high-profile outage does occur, we see organisations wanting to develop a more mature approach to their cloud deployments. 

One trend we’re seeing is that organisations are planning for high-availability and disaster recovery across multiple cloud locations, or are using hybrid cloud models rather than depending on a single provider’s ‘high availability’ functions. 

Another effective tactic is to create backups that can be restored to secondary cloud locations. Unplanned events such as a major public cloud outage often hit shadow IT initiatives hard, as the buyer has often not considered how to mitigate this risk appropriately. 

As a result, we’re seeing an increased number of organisations wanting to review their cloud deployment architecture.