In 2022, major cloud disruptions have been reported by public cloud suppliers including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, and others. Public cloud is known for its high redundancy and resilience, but even within these cloud infrastructure settings you’ll have to prioritize the backups for your IT environment as cloud outages might occur.
It is difficult to quantify the chances of experiencing outages in a public cloud environment because it depends on a number of factors, including the specific cloud provider and the underlying data center, hardware, and software infrastructure, as well as the design and configuration of the cloud environment itself. However, even among the most well-known cloud infrastructure companies globally, cloud outages turn out to occur on a regular basis.
It is important to note that the popular public cloud providers generally do have highly redundant infrastructure and systems in place to minimize the risk of cloud outages. Most public cloud providers also offer service level agreements (SLAs) that specify the uptime and availability of their services.
That being said, it is still important for organizations to plan for the possibility of cloud outages and to have strategies in place to mitigate the impact of outages on their operations. This may include implementing cloud backup and disaster recovery strategies, as well as designing their individual cloud environment with redundancy and failover in mind.
Cloud Outages: Its Causes
There are several reasons for cloud outages to occur, both those under the provider’s control and those that are not. The most typical ones are listed below.
- Cyberattacks – Cloud data centers may be overloaded with incoming traffic as a result of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattacks. End customers are then unable to utilize the service due to disruption of the networking infrastructure.
- Data center power outage – Many of the cloud infrastructure failures with substantial downtime and monetary loss are caused by power-related data center issues. Failures of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) seem to be the main reason for power outages.
- Cloud infrastructure software bugs – Bugs and glitches are not uncommon in cloud data center environments.
- Networking problems – Another frequent reason for cloud disruptions is associated with problems regarding network connection and external telecom partners.
- Data center or system maintenance – Cloud outages can occur as a result of planned or unplanned data center maintenance and system updates.
- Growing complexity cloud infrastructure – Operations in data centers seem to become increasingly challenging as a result of more complex cloud deployment patterns – such as hybrid and multi-cloud, as well as distributed cloud, which increases the likelihood of cloud disruptions.
- The human factor – An entire cloud infrastructure platform can be brought down by a single erroneous command or a cable installation error. Hardware and software problems brought on by human mistake are also a factor in causing cloud outages.
Cloud Backup Strategy
Creating backups of the cloud infrastructure is an important part of a disaster recovery plan and can help businesses protect their data and maintain business continuity. A backup for cloud infrastructure refers to creating copies of the data and configuration of a cloud computing environment and storing them in a separate location. This can include things like virtual machine (VM) images, databases, and configuration files.
A robust backup strategy may truly help you safeguard your systems and data in the case of a cloud outage. An utmost solid backup concept is to save three copies of your systems and data – two on distinct media and one offsite. There are numerous versions of this backup method, but the most important thing is to create redundancy and save at least three copies of your systems and data in several places. One copy on a local server, one on a distant server, and one in the cloud might all be examples of this.
A detailed disaster recovery plan is an important part of a backup strategy for cloud infrastructure. It specifies the team’s step-by-step procedures in the event of a cloud outage. This strategy outlines the procedures for data protection, failover, business continuity, and operation restoration. Planning ahead of time for a cloud outage saves time when deciding what to do when services are unavailable.
It might also be wise to spend a bit more money on an extended availability SLA, especially if your business-critical operations cannot afford prolonged cloud. Although these contracts are more expensive, the cloud service provider will then place a higher premium on keeping your infrastructural services operational.
To sum up, having a backup and disaster recovery plan available for cloud infrastructure can be important for organizations for several reasons including the following:
- Data protection – Backing up the cloud infrastructure can help businesses protect against data loss due to disasters, hardware failures, or other unexpected events.
- Disaster recovery – In the event of a disaster, such as a natural disaster or a cyberattack, a backup of the cloud infrastructure can help businesses quickly recover and resume operations.
- Compliance – Some industries and regulatory bodies have specific requirements for data backups and recovery. Backing up the cloud infrastructure can help businesses meet these requirements.
- Cost savings – Restoring the cloud infrastructure from a backup will be less expensive than rebuilding it from scratch.
