cloud outage
A cloud outage is a period of time during which cloud services are unavailable.
Cloud downtime can be caused by a number of different factors:
- Loss of power
- Network connectivity issues
- A data center going offline for maintenance (scheduled or unscheduled)
- Failed backups
- Natural disaster
- Software bugs
- Hacker attack/denial-of-service (DoS) attack
- Human error
Companies can protect against cloud outages by taking the following steps:
- Assessing the reliability of their cloud provider(s) data center(s).
- Replicating mission-critical data across multiple availability zones.
- Ensuring that application data is kept in hot standby form in multiple locations.
- Using more than one cloud provider so traffic can be diverted to one of the other functioning cloud sites.
- Having a plan in place that details what to do when a cloud outage occurs.
- Addressing the possibility of cloud outages in service-level agreements (SLAs).
If a cloud outage should occur, the provider should supply customers with status updates on a regular basis and an estimate of when the service will be restored.