Hoover, J. Nicholas. "Service Outages Force Cloud Adopters to Rethink Tactics" InformationWeek 1199 (August 18-25, 2008), p.24, 26
Existing Citations
outage (p.24): "Outages are just a reality," says Tim O'Brien, director of platform strategy for Microsoft. "Microsoft is a reputable company, Google's a reputable company, and Amazon's a reputable company. Even if you do your due diligence, you still have to manage around these risks, even if the risks are particularly low." All of which is forcing customers to rethink their dependency on software as a service and other cloud services, and devise strategies for the inevitable breakdowns... (†1536)
outage (p.24): Most SLAs reimburse customers for lost service, but not for revenue lost as a consequence of service outages. Amazon applies a 10% credit if S3 availability dips below 99.9% in a month, and last month's outage forced Amazon to make good on that policy. "That's all well and good, but doesn't make the business whole relative to the damage," says Gartner analyst Rob DeSisto. (†1539)
service level agreement (p.24): When negotiating for cloud computing services, IT departments should insist on service-level agreements that have some teeth to them. Herbert says. SLAs that guarantee a high level of uptime aren't necessarily standard. Salesforce doesn't commit to uptime thresholds-unless you insist on it during negotiations, [Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert] says. (†1540)
