Introduction
The chance that a cloud outage would cause downtime and financial losses increases as your reliance on cloud services grows. In 2022, about 60% of organisations that use the public cloud reported losses due to these incidents, demonstrating that disruptions are not uncommon.
What Causes Cloud Outages?
A variety of factors can cause cloud outages. Perhaps a specific piece of malware knocked off some important systems, or a DDoS attack overloaded your servers. Cloud outages may be classified as a kind of cybercrime, which is becoming a more regular cause of sudden data centre downtown. Yet, as with other IT systems, the most common hardware-based cause of cloud outages is a power outage. These can include hardware failure, network outages, and power outages, among other things.
Other common causes of cloud outages include:
- Natural calamities
- Cyber threats (DDoS, hacking, harmful viruses, etc.)
- Human error
- Application defects
- Poorly designed architecture
- Inability of the organisation to stay prepared for failure
What Happens When Cloud Goes Down?
A cloud outage should, at most, only last a few minutes and only impact a small number of users or services. In the worst-case scenario, an outage shuts down a client’s business for half a day or longer. A company loses access to all cloud-based assets and remains disconnected until the outage is resolved.
While this is concerning, errors by third-party suppliers were responsible for “just” 7% of major outages in 2021. A major outage must include one (or more) of the following:
- Significant financial losses.
- Reputational damage.
- Compliance breaches.
Understanding the Damage from a Cloud Outage
Even the most dependable cloud service providers have service outages from time to time. Furthermore, the longer you use the cloud, the more likely it is that you will have service interruptions. The following are the most prevalent consequences of cloud outages:
- End-user and business-user business applications are unavailable.
- Revenue loss due to transactional failures
- Loss of customer trust
- Loss of data
- Inconsistencies in data cause difficulties in launching commercial applications.
Check out the infographic below by ERS IT Solutions which takes a further look at Cloud Outages and some of the most significant cloud outages that have happened.
