BlackBerry outage highlights cloud frailties

The entire world, consumers and businesses, are moving most, if not all, their data, applications and services to the cloud if the buzz at London's recent IT Expo trade show was anything to go by.

However, the recent outage that denied up to 70 million BlackBerry users access to their email for four days earlier this month highlights the perils of trusting any hosted IT service models that rely so heavily on a distributed network to function.

BlackBerry is a hosted messaging service akin to a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) proposition, albeit without the flexible provisioning and licensing advantages – unless, as in this case, one of RIM's core routers goes on the blink and there is no adequate failover mechanism to forward messages on to users in its absence.

And whether the fault lies in the network router, a hosted server, datacentre power supply or any other part of the elongated information supply chain that makes up the data path between the end user and IT resource they are trying to access remotely, the fact remains that all cloud-based services are vulnerable to outages, as Google, Amazon, Apple and others have found out previously to their cost.