If you’re an IT decision maker, you’ve probably considered using Amazon Web Services’ EC2 virtual server offering. AWS gives your team the ability to spin up virtual servers on demand and pay for only what you use.
The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model can provide advantages in certain deployment scenarios. On the other hand, hosting critical apps and services that keep your business flowing takes a tremendous amount of trust in an IaaS provider.
Can You Trust the Cloud?
At the end of the day, IaaS providers such as AWS must own up to their service level agreements when outages occur.
If you’re in a business that requires maximum uptime, wouldn’t it make sense to have the maximum amount of control over the infrastructure that houses your apps and data?
When you choose a service like AWS, you’re at their mercy should the right set of circumstances occur. Think about what happened to Google Cloud Platform back in August of 2015.
Lightning Strikes Google Cloud Platform; Causes Data Loss
A lightning strike that hit Google’s Western European data center caused a data loss that measured to be less than 0.000001%. While that may not sound awful, you’d probably be upset if your business happened to be impacted by the 0.000001% figure.
AWS DynamoDB Outage Breaks Reddit, Netflix and More
In September of 2015, Amazon Web Services suffered an outage stemming from its DynamoDB service. This left users of popular apps such as Netflix, Tinder and Reddit without the ability to access these platforms.
Reviewing Popular IaaS Provider Uptime Numbers
In 2014, each of the “Big Three” cloud providers suffered some sort of downtime. Here are the numbers for each IaaS provider:
- AWS – 6.01 Hours of Downtime in 2014
- Google Compute Engine – 3.46 Hours of Downtime in 2014
- Microsoft Azure – 42.94 hours of Downtime in 2014
Experiencing downtime that is totally out of your control can become frustrating as an IT professional.
The Great Debate: Colo vs. Cloud
While cloud can provide several strategic advantages to organizations that rapidly need to build and deploy apps, colocation provides IT decision makers with the ability to completely customize, administrate and have complete confidence that their workload will have the maximum uptime possible.
There’s a certain confidence in knowing exactly where a dedicated server sits in a cage and being able to trace that dedicated server back to the switch. With IaaS, businesses risk running their apps and storing their data in a facility that they don’t control. For many IT decision makers, that’s a risk that their organization can’t afford to take.
