Most experts, I think, believe Cloud is the future. Even critics accept that it appears to be an unstoppable force with Google leading the way.
However, recent research appears to suggest that at the moment at least, cloud computing is not without its problems, costing businesses in the USA a massive $70 million and more.
If this is extrapolated across the globe, then internationally the economic benefits may not be as clear-cut as we all thought.
What is the problem? Cloud failure is the cause, according to the .International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR), which reports a total of 568 hours downtime at 13 US based cloud service providers since 2007. This outage problem affected many businesses to the tune of $71.7 million.
Seemingly, the average downtime during the period was 7.5 hours per year, which on the surface does not appear to be very huge, but it is the cumulative effect that is damaging, not the individual outages.
A spokesperson for the IWGCR told computerworld.com: “It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999%). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year.”
The interesting thing for me about this is that these outages involve major corporations involved in cloud computing. These are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, PayPal, Twitter, and Yahoo as well as smaller organisations.
The research organisation, however, said that currently methodology does need to be improved to give a proper picture.
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