Lessons from the latest cloud outages

Rob Lovell entreats VARs to consider cloud service provider support and service guarantees

Microsoft's cloud services took a real hit recently, as lightning bolts in Dublin resulted in the BPOS outage and the internet's DNS address system failed, which caused Office 365 some problems.

The company should be thinking about how to provide better services to its customers. Common sense holds that no one should put all his or her eggs in one basket when it comes to IT.

Relying on just one datacentre to deliver critical business services to a range of companies across Europe is extremely risky – even aside from the privacy concerns raised over where data is hosted.

Unfortunately, companies that take unnecessary risks may also give the wider cloud computing industry a bad name.

Resellers looking to partner with cloud providers to deliver services to their customers should know that a service level agreement (SLA) based on this kind of practice is not worth the paper on which it is written.

Any experienced cloud provider will back up its services, hosted across multiple datacentres, to ensure continuous availability.

Resellers are only able to maximise the key benefits of the cloud if they choose the right service provider.

They need to look for those that have good credentials and strong, clearly defined SLAs, with the best service uptime guarantees.

In general, a so-called three nines or four nines guarantee, where service availability is guaranteed 99.9 per cent or 99.99 per cent of the time, will be suitable.

They should also be looking at what level of support is offered from the provider, as well as a disaster recovery plan to cover all eventualities.

For resellers that have established their reputations by delivering sound advice to customers, it surely isn't worth jeopardising this trust by offering sub-standard cloud services.

Rob Lovell is chief executive officer of ThinkGrid