Why planning for cloud disruption can save you in the long run

The recent DDoS attack that left AWS services unavailable for several hours served as a reminder that while public cloud offers attractive benefits over a private data center, it’s still ‘someone else’s computer’.

AWS has the lion’s share of business when it comes to cloud storage. But for many companies, losing access to the Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3, was a painful reminder that even giants can fall sometimes - and when they do, it’s wise to have an alternative.

Moving all your eggs to one public cloud basket can actually centralize the risk of service downtime and operational disruption. Especially because the cloud makes it easier for functions to introduce new services to their workflow, your organization might be using software hosted in the cloud without knowing it.

It’s only on the occasion we see major cloud failures, does it become clear that hundreds or thousands of customers are affected. If not planned for, cloud outages can pose a significant threat to digital supply chains.

Redundancy and resilience are essential parts of strategy

Understandably, the enterprise today is very nervous about dependencies on a single cloud. Despite Amazon's strong leadership, the growth rates of Microsoft Azure and, more recently, Google Cloud make it clear that all three are going to have a pretty strong competitive differentiation depending on the workload. But there’s a second argument that the same workload could be run across different providers to ensure redundancy.

This is probably one of the reasons why a small but growing proportion of enterprises - according to RightScale - have a strategy around multiple public clouds and the vast majority will maintain a mix of public and private clouds.

Of course, business leaders want to reduce TCO and increase the agility and scalability of on-premises storage and compute by extending their data infrastructure to the public cloud. In terms of connectivity, the network mix has to shift in parallel and there also has to be a consideration for redundancy, allowing for workloads to move seamlessly between public and private cloud platforms, while creating a consistent architecture across both environments.

As a result, businesses need to deploy data center interconnection that is as flexible and agile as the dynamic digital assets they already rely on in order to protect themselves against service failures and outages.