outage [English]

Syndetic Relationships

InterPARES Definition

n. ~ Loss of use or degradation of functionality.

Other Definitions

  • Wikipedia (†387 s.v. outage): Unavailability or decrease in quality of service due to unexpected behavior of that particular service, or an incident impacting consumers that results in a service not being delivered at a level they reasonably expected.

Citations

  • Butler 2012 (†672 ): There's a perception, says Gartner cloud security analyst Jay Heiser, that the most significant risk in using the cloud is that sensitive data can be leaked. But there's been little evidence of that, he says. Sony suffered a compromise of potentially tens of millions of customers in 2011 related to its cloud, and there have been a handful of other breaches of personally identifiable information being leaked from the cloud. But more common nowadays are cloud outages and data loss, and Heiser says many enterprises are ill-prepared for those incidents. (†1537)
  • Butler 2013 (†673 ): Others believe that outages are just a fact of life in IT, and especially the cloud. David Linthicum, CTO of cloud consultancy Blue Mountain Labs, points out that public cloud providers, like AWS, likely have much more resilient systems compared to in-house IT shops. The key is preparing for the outages. "I'm sure there will be many more outages this year, and next year. You just need to build those types of events into your cloud service usage and operations planning. I just don't see the point of 'handwringing' over each of these outages." (†1541)
  • Hoover 2008 (†671 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)
  • Hoover 2008 (†671 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)
  • Srinivasan 2013 (†689 p.59): Moreover, when many customers are still ranking cloud security as their main concern in their switch to cloud computing, the providers have to offer many trust building measures. One such is system reliability. This has suffered some setback because of some well publicized instances of cloud outage. ... Since reliability could still be an issue for some customers, one possible solution to using cloud services is to split the types of cloud services among multiple service providers. A common approach to this could be to use one cloud provider for operations and another provider for storage solutions. (†1573)