The impact of cloud outages is growing

Cloud, hosted and many other internet-based services and workloads are designed to operate with very low failure rates. Large (at-scale) cloud and IT service providers use an array of software and data management tools, strategies and services to ensure the highest levels of availability. In this way, they are usually able to reroute workloads and traffic away from failures and cushion the user in the event of disruption. Overall, they provide high levels of service availability, at huge scale and with growing complexity.

Even so, no architecture is fail-safe, and professional, specialist management is no guarantor of fault-free operations. Uptime Institute research shows commercial provider/operators (including cloud/internet giant, digital services, colocation, and telecom) together accounted for almost three-quarters (72%) of major, publicly recorded outages in 2020 (see Figure 1). This is a significant increase on the five-year average figure (53%) for digital services, cloud/internet and telecom combined.