The public cloud providers including Amazon and Microsoft are enabling business and technology advancements everywhere you look — from our world economy to our personal lives. But what happens when a public cloud provider has an outage? How painful is it for you?
For you as an individual, it may only be a minor inconvenience, like not being able to breeze through an airport line and pull up your electronic boarding pass as you approach the gate. But if you made a business bet on the promise of greater agility and lower costs, a cloud outage can create the opposite effect — paralysing your business and lowering revenues.
The really scary reality for business leaders is that they cannot answer just how painful the outage was.
“Which services went down and for how long?”
“How much revenue did lose?”
“What are customers and the market saying about us?”
“Was the problem we had today caused by the cloud outage, or did something else go wrong?”
It may sound crazy, but many enterprises don’t have visibility to how much they have riding on the cloud.
Cloud resources are being purchased at an amazing rate, by teams and departments all over the enterprise, to support business applications and drive their digital transformation.
This adoption is not easy to track inside a business and the speed of competition has made getting the app released more critical than getting the centralised control once enjoyed by IT.
The cloud providers have made it easy, which is great, but it’s created a surprisingly big challenge for enterprise IT to answer the boss when she asks, “how bad was it for us?”
Today’s Digital Enterprise requires IT to do more than ever before:
The Cloud promise is real and the bet is a safe one to make, but it does present new challenges. The IT organisations who can address them the fastest will be best positioned to not just support — but drive — their digital enterprise transformation.
And instead of asking “how painful was the AWS outage”, they can think about how much money they made when they stayed up and their competitors went down.
Chris Gibbs is Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand at BMC Software.
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