The bottom line is that it can be much more expensive and much more complex to set up your operation to use multiple clouds to protect yourself from a catastrophic failure of one of those clouds.
You are also paying for the VMware licensing,” Ellis says. “VCF is probably the easiest one to implement because you don’t have to do a lot of change to your actual servers, but it’s also pretty costly because you’re not only paying for the compute resources in the cloud. “There are a lot of infrastructure primitives that are just managed differently between the clouds,” he says.Īnother option is to use an abstraction layer or containers such as VMware Cloud Foundation or Kubernetes.
“For most, probably 90-95% of businesses, the costs and technical effort in doing that scares them away from it.”įor instance, he says, moving a Windows Server from AWS to Azure requires a change in the virtual machine footprint, the connection to different types of resources, and other reconfigurations for cloud-based networking. “We got a number of inquiries asking the question: Do we need to be resilient across multiple clouds or multiple regions?” Ellis says. That was heightened further after the DecemAWS outage, says Ellis. It makes sense that CIOs are paying more attention to cloud resiliency now that so much more of their operations run there. Today it’s dropped back to about 44%, according to Roy Illsley, chief analyst for IT ecosystems and operations at Omdia. When the pandemic hit, that number shot up to nearly 50%. There were banks that couldn’t process transactions, largely because mobile was down.”Īnalyst firm Omdia estimates that in 2019 about 25% of workloads were running in the cloud. There were retailers who couldn’t sell things. “This was in the middle of Christmas season. “We definitely had a lot of customers who panicked,” says Brent Ellis, Forrester Research senior analyst who follows cloud resiliency. The outage came at a time when many organizations had shifted more workloads to the cloud as a way to deal with the complications of the pandemic, and that made this cloud outage - and will make other cloud outages - hurt even more. But there were any number of other companies that rely on AWS for other purposes who were hit by the outage, too. And so were all the vendors that rely on Amazon’s marketplace to sell and ship their products. Certainly, Amazon’s own enormous retail operation was impacted including the company’s Whole Foods grocery business. 7, 2021, when Amazon Web Services experienced an outage and took down much of the infrastructure around holiday shopping with it.