We're going to talk about the cloud. More specifically, cloud outages and how to avoid them and mitigate their impacts.
There's no way we can dig into this topic without touching on multicloud strategies.
Even back in 2019, when we surveyed WAN managers about their organization’s cloud infrastructure, we found that three in four enterprises had already gone multicloud, with at least two IaaS providers. We also found that the majority of enterprises were in hybrid cloud situations, with some mix of public, private, and on-premises data centers.
To help us explore all things cloud, we're thrilled to welcome Mike Gibbs, CEO of Go Cloud Careers, to the podcast. Listen to his conversation with Greg about prepping for a career in the cloud, why it confounds so many, and dealing with those aforementioned outages.
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Key Takeaways
A Single Cloud Provider is a Single Point of Failure
Cloud outages are a reality and can impact large numbers of users and affect multiple regions. Relying on a single cloud provider is likened to relying on a single service provider link for critical WAN connections, which is a practice networking professionals have advised against for decades.
Decades of experience building high-availability, mission-critical systems teach the principle of "no single points of failure" or "one is none, two is one." A single cloud provider, despite internal redundancies, can still experience widespread issues that impact all services hosted with them.
Mitigation Requires Redundancy and Strategic Architecture
To mitigate cloud outages, organizations should adopt strategies that involve redundancy and potentially leverage multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
This includes ensuring redundant physical connections to cloud providers from the enterprise side, involving redundant routers with multiple power supplies, circuits, and control modules.
In a hybrid cloud scenario, keeping mission-critical applications or those requiring low latency and high performance on-premises in a controlled data center environment can be beneficial, as on-premises infrastructure can sometimes offer better performance and lower latency than cloud services accessed over a WAN.
Further, security architecture should use industry-standard, next-generation security tools that can be deployed consistently across on-premises environments and multiple cloud providers, rather than relying solely on potentially less robust or provider-specific native cloud tools, to maintain unified policy and avoid vendor lock-in. Decisions about where to place data and applications should be driven by business goals and application performance requirements.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
