The outage started at roughly 6pm AEDT on Monday. It was brought on by a malfunction at considered one of AWS’ information centres positioned in Northern Virginia in america. AWS says it has mounted the underlying situation however some web customers are nonetheless reporting service disruptions.

This incident highlights the vulnerabilities of relying a lot on cloud computing – or “the cloud” because it’s usually referred to as. However there are methods to mitigate a number of the dangers.

Renting IT infrastructure

Cloud computing is the on-demand supply of various IT assets similar to computing energy, database storage, and functions over the web. In easy phrases, it’s renting (not proudly owning) your individual IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing got here into prevalence with the dot com increase within the late Nineteen Nineties, whereby digital tech firms began to ship software program over the web. As firms similar to Amazon matured in their very own skill to supply what’s often known as “software program as a service” over the net, they began to supply others the power to hire their digital servers for a value as properly.

This was a profitable worth proposition. Cloud computing allows a pay-as-you-go mannequin just like a utility invoice, fairly than the massive upfront funding required to buy, function and handle your individual information centre.

In consequence, the newest statistics counsel greater than 94% of all enterprises use cloud-based companies in some type.

The massive 3’s market domination

The worldwide cloud market is dominated by three firms. AWS holds the biggest share (roughly 30%). It’s adopted by Microsoft Azure (about 20%) and Google Cloud Platform (about 13%).

All three service suppliers have had latest outages, considerably impacting digital service platforms. For instance, in 2024, a problem with third-party software program severely impacted Microsoft Azure, inflicting in depth operational failures for companies globally.

Google Cloud Platform additionally skilled a significant outage this 12 months on account of an inner misconfiguration.

Profound dangers

The heavy reliance of the worldwide web on only a few main suppliers — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — creates profound dangers for each companies and on a regular basis customers.

First, this focus varieties a single level of failure. As seen within the newest AWS occasion, a easy configuration error in a single central system can set off a domino impact that immediately paralyses huge segments of the web.

Second, these suppliers usually impose vendor lock-in. Corporations discover it prohibitively troublesome and costly to change platforms on account of advanced information architectures and excessively excessive charges charged for transferring giant volumes of knowledge out of the cloud (information egress prices). This successfully traps clients, leaving them hostage to a single vendor’s phrases.

Lastly, the dominance of US-based cloud service suppliers introduces geopolitical and regulatory dangers. Knowledge saved in these huge methods is topic to US legal guidelines and authorities calls for, which may complicate compliance with worldwide information sovereignty laws similar to Australia’s Privateness Act.

Moreover, these firms maintain the facility to censor or prohibit entry to companies, giving them management over how corporations function.

The present greatest follow to mitigate these dangers is to undertake a multi-cloud strategy that lets you decentralise. This entails working important functions throughout a number of distributors to get rid of the one level of failure.

This strategy could be complemented by what’s often known as “edge computing”, whereby information storage and processing is moved away from giant, central information centres, towards smaller, distributed nodes (similar to native servers) that corporations can management immediately.

The mixture of edge computing and a multi-cloud strategy enhances resilience, improves velocity, and helps firms meet strict information regulatory necessities whereas avoiding dependence on any single entity.

Because the previous saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in a single basket.

• Jongkil Jay Jeong, Senior Fellow, Faculty of Computing and Info System, The College of Melbourne

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