Xtium Research
Amazon experiences another outage
Amazon's Web Services (AWS) suffered another setback when it encountered a network problem on Monday, CRN reported. Reddit, Foursquare and Pinterest all had connectivity issues throughout the day as a result, but the problems did not appear as widespread as in July. The outages demonstrated the problems with sharing information from several different companies on the same servers. A virtual private cloud, on the other hand, handles each company's information on a separate network, allowing C-level executives to rest easier.
The outages are also not indicative of the cloud's performance as a whole. Even the public cloud has seen tremendous strides in recent years. Amazon's outage was unfortunate, but the damage so far appears to be limited to the single tech company. Amazon leaders surely hope there will not be as large a backlash as in July, considering service was intermittent and "degraded" rather than suffering a complete breakdown.
Moving to the cloud securely
For CIOs looking at alternatives to in-house legacy systems, the public cloud is starting to look less attractive. Decision makers want to be sure that they will still have access to data and control over their own network, which is less possible in a public cloud environment. A virtual private cloud like those provided by Xtium, however, can offer dramatic cost savings while still guaranteeing 100 percent access to and recovery of applications and data.
Initial reports of the AWS outage mentioned activity by hactivists like Anonymous, but it is likely these were unfounded. The organization appears to want little more than attention and has relied almost exclusively on DDoS attacks rather than more diverse approaches. Anonymous also took credit for GoDaddy outages earlier in 2012, but this, too, turned out to be inaccurate.
More likely, Amazon simply ran into technical difficulties, which is to be expected in any environment. The reason the effects of such outages become compounded is that they affect a large variety of businesses. However, switching to a virtual private cloud means having greater individual control over the network while still slashing costs significantly.
The long term financial effects for Amazon are still unknown, but the company has invested in a wide range of products for revenue security. For example, after the internal issues the business reported strong sales of the Kindle Fire, according to Business Insider. Do not count the tech giant out of the running yet.