Azure’s crucial role online – Why are we putting all of our business eggs in one basket?
Exactly how much of the internet was impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
Recent outages have laid bare the fragility of the modern-day internet, according to engineering professor Gregory Falco of Cornell University.
“When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it’s thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together,” said Mr Falco.
He noted that some of those pieces are managed by the companies themselves while others are overseen by third parties such as CrowdStrike, which last year deployed a software update that affected more than eight million computers run on Microsoft systems.
Why do we do it?
So why have we become so reliant upon Microsoft, Google, Amazon web services? Businesses have become blinkered and seem to be under the pretence that if they house all of their data with the ‘Big Boys’ of technology they will be safe and don’t have to worry. Cost effectiveness of cloud data hosting is largely a myth. The advertising blurb makes it all appear like the best move to make, but in the majority of cases it is not financially viable, and also becomes a businesses single point of failure. Failing to plan for such eventualities as internet outage, and how can we run our business in the event of an outage seems to have slipped companies minds altogether. The big players make decisions without considering all eventualities, and the people who do the planning and execution of said plans are more often than not qualified up to the hilt, ITIL, BA’s, Prince2, CAPM, Six Sigma, etc. but do not have the simple common sense needed to accompany those qualifications.
It is time to re-evaluate business and technology operations before it is too late. Maybe it is too late already ……
