What the cloud industry can learn from the recent AWS outage

The recent outage suffered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) brought about implications for a number of popular websites, with customers having to deal with around four hours of downtime.

Predictably, the incident attracted attention from all over the industry, with experts giving their opinion on what lessons can be learned from the outage.

Multi-server can help your website keep going

While there is certainly some merit in distributing services across regions, the AWS outage arguably strengthens the argument for implementing a multi-server strategy.

As the old saying goes, never put all your eggs in one basket.

If services are distributed over more than one cloud service, it means that if one service, such as storage, goes down, it doesn’t bring down the rest of your website.

Using a multi-server system helps to reduce the possibility of suffering from a single point of failure, making it easier to keep a website up and running.

Communication is key

Companies and organisations will always emerge positively from an outage if they do their utmost to try and put themselves in the position of the customer or end-user.

The first step is for brands to proactively monitor their sites from the perspective of the end-user, as this will help speed up the efficiency of dealing with any problems.

Communication is key to responding to any outage. Proactively communicating with customers in a clear and precise manner is a key part of maintaining trust.

Trust in the cloud still needs to be strengthened

Outages and other pieces of bad press are always sure to deal a blow to the cloud in terms of trust, so providers will need to work a little harder in order to mend that trust.

Convincing company admins about the benefits of the cloud only requires the quoting of a few simple facts.

For example, the cloud eliminates many of the simplistic, repetitive and otherwise generic tasks that go into managing the infrastructure of a modern IT system.

Implementing a cloud service means IT managers can focus on helping businesses become more competitive by exploring more innovative strategies.

Cloud storage not only offers more flexibility in terms of how data is processed, but also helps to free up previously over-used resources.