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How Can Recent Trends in Cloud Computing Mitigate Outages?

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The United Kingdom’s record-breaking temperatures this summer took down data centers belonging to Google and Oracle, disrupting a range of cloud services. However, those outages are just the latest in a long line of cloud outages in 2022. Vendors have experienced a range of problems, including cut fiber cables, changes in coding, or air system shutdowns. Overall, the era of cloud computing has resulted in more frequent outages but with less severity. (Although, like most things, the severity doesn’t matter as much to the end-user— it matters when it happens to you). Estimates put the global cloud computing market size at US$380 billion in 2021. By 2030, it’s projected to hit US$1,614 billion.

As the world moves toward a hybrid working model, only the cloud can keep up. The primary requirement for hybrid work is mobile flexibility. As such, a platform that provides the same easy-to-use experience no matter the user’s location is essential. With Gartner anticipating 85% of all organizations to embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025, organizations who focus on the cloud for hybrid work are best positioned to capitalize.

Complexity Leads to Cloud Outages

Complexity is not a new challenge for IT. However, the COVID-19 pandemic created more complexity for the cloud through the quick digital transformation of many users. According to Andy Lawrence of the Uptime Institute, “The lack of improvement in overall outage rates is partly the result of the immensity of recent investment in digital infrastructure and all the associated complexity that operators face as they transition to hybrid, distributed architectures.”

Most enterprises reported that they once supported about 500 cloud services for the entire enterprise and now support about 3,000 services over a multi-cloud deployment. Nearly 40% of organizations have suffered a major outage caused by human error. Of these incidents, 85% have a root cause of staff failing to follow procedures or flaws in the processes and procedures themselves.

Plan for Resiliency with Cloud-Agnostic Architectures

Outages are an unfortunate but inevitable aspect of cloud computing as every cloud vendor experiences outages. However, you can still protect your business in this new reality by making your applications cloud-agnostic. This means that they are not dependent on any single cloud vendor, meaning you can shift workloads seamlessly between cloud vendors and regions in the event of an outage.

While there are benefits to the cloud-agnostic type of architecture, adoption can be expensive and time-consuming, which is why many companies are implementing multi-cloud infrastructures as a service (IaaS).

A Quarantine for the Digital Age

The increased adoption of hybrid and public clouds, combined with security breaches and cloud outages, leave many people with concerns about cloud security.

Confidential computing aims to solve some of these concerns by providing cyber security safeguards for highly sensitive information during transit. The process “helps to ensure that data remains confidential at all times in trusted environments that isolate data from internal and external threats,” explains Justin Lam, data security research analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence Lam explained. Confidential computing will be increasingly important going forward to demonstrate regulatory compliance and security best practices.

Enhance Your Cloud Knowledge

Learn more about the benefits and challenges of cloud computing and how it pertains to your organization. Check out the Cloud Computing course program, which offers 25 self-paced courses focused on various aspects of cloud computing technologies.

Contact an IEEE Content Specialist for more details about getting access to this program for your organization.

Interested in getting the program for yourself? Visit the IEEE Learning Network.

Resources:

Condon, Stephanie. (19 July 2022). Record-breaking heatwave causes cloud-computing problems. ZDNet.

Goasduff, Laurence. (10 November 2021). Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences. Gartner.

Linthicum, David. (14 June 2022). Complexity leads to cloud outages. Here’s the proof. InfoWorld. 

Long, Zane. (22 July 2022). Hybrid Work = Cloud: How Partners Can Seize the Moment. Channel Futures. 

MacRae, Duncun. (9 June 2022). Downtime impact worsening as industry fails to curb outages. CloudTech.

Millward, Wade Tyler. (1 July 2022). The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2022 (So Far). CRN.

Precedence Research. (13 May 2022). Cloud Computing Market Size to Hit US$ 1,614.1 Billion by 2030. GlobeNewswire.

Plumb, Taryn. (22 July 2022). Confidential computing: A quarantine for the digital age. VentureBeat.

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