“Cloud services [as a whole]
need some more maturing and a
much more hardened infrastructure and security model prior to
our adoption,” Haugan said.
Jay Leader, a senior vice president and CIO at iRobot, whose
products include the Roomba
vacuum cleaner, said the Amazon
outage illustrates well the limitation of cloud computing.
“We don’t use Amazon or any
other public cloud services, and
we won’t, perhaps ever, or at least
until there is much more transparency about where the data lives,
who controls where it lives and
when and where it moves, and lots
of other things,” Leader said.
Analysts noted that the
Amazon incident further
increased IT concerns about
application availability and the
security of cloud services.
“Obviously, these issues are
very heightened right now and
will continue to be so for quite a
while in light of the outage,” said
Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf.
“Amazon portrays an aura of
invincibility, whether inten-
tional or not, and this outage
is going to remind enterprise
customers that nobody is perfect
and increased due diligence is
Hilgendorf said IT managers remain most concerned about
cloud security — including whether user authentication and
access control measures are adequate, how much access a service
provider has to a customer’s systems and data, and the potential
for an accidental release of protected data.
The Amazon outage also reinforces the fact that there’s no way
to directly migrate customer data to another provider, said Arun
Taneja, an analyst at Taneja Group. If a service goes down, the host
company must return the data to its customer, which then must
find another provider or revert back to storing it locally, he said.
Coupled with recent decisions by EMC, Iron Mountain,
Cirtas Systems and others to shut down or scale back hosted
storage offerings, the Amazon incident could spur a backlash
against cloud storage services, even though they can offer good
value, Taneja said. u
Lucas Mearian contributed to this story.
Amazon Service Outage
Reinforces Cloud Doubts
NEWS ANALYSIS
The incident could curb business adoption of hosted application
or storage services. By Patrick Thibodeau and Jaikumar Vijayan
THE PROLONGED OUTAGE of Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud service late last month could set back adoption of hosted services by giving some companies — especially those that are on the fence about migrating to the cloud — a strong argument for taking it slowly.
For other organizations, Amazon’s problems reinforced an
already-held belief that cloud services can’t match an enterprise
IT operation when it comes to meeting the technology needs of
business or government entities.
More than a week after the days-long partial outage started
on April 21, Amazon released a detailed 5,700-word postmortem
and mea culpa that identified the culprit as a configuration error
that occurred during a network upgrade.
“The recent outage confirmed, for us, that cloud services are
not yet ready for prime time,” said Paul Haugan, CTO for the city
of Lynnwood, Wash. The city had been looking into Amazon’s
The recent outage confirmed, for us, that cloud services are not yet ready for prime time.
