The world’s largest cloud computing platform, Amazon Internet Providers (AWS), skilled a major outage that has impacted hundreds of organisations, together with banks, monetary software program platforms comparable to Xero, and social media platforms comparable to Snapchat.
The outage started at roughly 6pm AEDT on Monday. It was brought on by a malfunction at one among AWS’ information centres situated in Northern Virginia in the USA. AWS says it has fixed the underlying issue however some web customers are nonetheless reporting service disruptions.
This incident highlights the vulnerabilities of relying a lot on cloud computing – or “the cloud” because it’s usually referred to as. However there are methods to mitigate a number of the dangers.
Renting IT infrastructure
Cloud computing is the on-demand supply of numerous IT sources comparable to computing energy, database storage, and functions over the web. In easy phrases, it’s renting (not proudly owning) your individual IT infrastructure.
Cloud computing got here into prevalence with the dot com growth within the late Nineteen Nineties, whereby digital tech corporations began to ship software program over the web. As corporations comparable to Amazon matured in their very own capacity to supply what’s often known as “software program as a service” over the online, they began to supply others the flexibility to lease their digital servers for a value as nicely.
This was a profitable worth proposition. Cloud computing permits a pay-as-you-go mannequin much like a utility invoice, moderately than the massive upfront funding required to buy, function and handle your individual information centre.
Consequently, the most recent statistics recommend greater than 94% of all enterprises use cloud-based companies in some type.
The massive 3’s market domination
The worldwide cloud market is dominated by three companies. AWS holds the biggest share (roughly 30%). It’s adopted by Microsoft Azure (about 20%) and Google Cloud Platform (about 13%).
All three service suppliers have had latest outages, considerably impacting digital service platforms. For instance, in 2024, a difficulty with third-party software program severely impacted Microsoft Azure, inflicting intensive operational failures for companies globally.
Google Cloud Platform additionally skilled a significant outage this 12 months resulting from an inner misconfiguration.
Profound dangers
The heavy reliance of the worldwide web on only a few main suppliers — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — creates profound dangers for each companies and on a regular basis customers.
First, this focus types a single level of failure. As seen within the newest AWS occasion, a easy configuration error in a single central system can set off a domino impact that immediately paralyses huge segments of the web.
Second, these suppliers usually impose vendor lock-in. Firms discover it prohibitively tough and costly to change platforms resulting from complicated information architectures and excessively high fees charged for shifting giant volumes of information out of the cloud (information egress prices). This successfully traps clients, leaving them hostage to a single vendor’s phrases.
Lastly, the dominance of US-based cloud service suppliers introduces geopolitical and regulatory dangers. Information saved in these huge programs is topic to US legal guidelines and authorities calls for, which might complicate compliance with worldwide information sovereignty rules comparable to Australia’s Privateness Act.
Moreover, these corporations maintain the facility to censor or prohibit entry to companies, giving them management over how companies function.
The present finest apply to mitigate these dangers is to undertake a multi-cloud strategy that allows you to decentralise. This includes operating crucial functions throughout a number of distributors to remove the one level of failure.
This strategy could be complemented by what’s often known as “edge computing”, whereby information storage and processing is moved away from giant, central information centres, towards smaller, distributed nodes (comparable to native servers) that companies can management immediately.
The mixture of edge computing and a multi-cloud strategy enhances resilience, improves pace, and helps corporations meet strict information regulatory necessities whereas avoiding dependence on any single entity.
Because the previous saying goes, don’t put your whole eggs in a single basket.
- Jongkil Jay Jeong, Senior Fellow, College of Computing and Data System, The University of Melbourne
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