Greg Hale, writing in his newsletter from ISS Source:
While the cloud does not dominate the everyday mechanisms of the manufacturing automation sector, this week’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage shows a clear dependance on any one of the three main providers is something every organization needs to review. Only three cloud providers dominate the global market, and when any of them experience outages, the ripple effects are massive,” said Dewan Chowdhury, chief executive and founder of security provider, malcrawler. “Universities lose access to online portals. Restaurants cannot process digital orders. Critical infrastructure operators lose visibility into their devices. This concentration of control has created a fragile ecosystem where one failure can disrupt entire sectors.” Amazon said this week’s outage which occurred Monday was likely caused by issues related to its domain name system, or DNS, which converts website addresses into numeric ones, allowing websites and apps to load on Internet-connected devices.
I’m with the supposed root cause. I’ve recently had two major issues due to WPMU Dev dinking around with my DNS and IP addresses. One little change, and my website is down—and it’s up to me to trace the problem.
David Heinemeier-Hansen, CTO and co-founder of 37 Signals, recently reviewed the risk and costs involved with the company’s reliance on these cloud services. He concluded that for a company of their size, they were better off financially and with risk by building their own.
I’ve been in the midst of discussions in another arena with the same idea—risk management. These discussions have focused on data interoperability. A company allowing multiple proprietary data silos invites a higher risk profile from the inability to find and act on data prudently and promptly.
What are you doing to mitigate risk?
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