BlackBerry outage highlights cloud frailties

A stark reminder of how failed routers, servers or datacentres underpinning hosted services can bring a business to its knees

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.

BlackBerry outage highlights cloud frailties

A stark reminder of how failed routers, servers or datacentres underpinning hosted services can bring a business to its knees

The key question is the extent to which companies or individuals are willing to put up with the inconvenience of those outages for the sake of the other benefits that leasing cloud-hosted services affords them.

Asen Tsvyatkov is strategy and experience planner at storage company EMC, focusing on end users rather than technology, and particularly how their use of cloud-enabled applications and services is driving demand for similar environments once they get into the office.

"If you think about it from a cost benefit point of view, an organisation being able to operate in an untethered, mobile way is far more valuable than it being affected for a brief period by a power outage or security breach," he said. "It is inevitable that some sort of unpredictable failure will sometimes occur, but the benefits of being hugely scalable and being able to virtualise outweigh those."

Matt McCloskey is head of applications and services at Virgin Media Business, the UK telco that recently started offering hosted cloud services to British companies for the first time in partnership with global data centre operator Savvis.

He agrees that no cloud service can ever be one hundred per cent reliable. But he argues that in some cases - depending on the provider, network configuration and data centre redundancy set up - they can be made to be more resilient than the companies' internal network and server infrastructure to at least match, if not exceed, local system uptime.

"Those that really want to ensure their applications are as responsive as on- premise infrastructures can opt for an IP virtual private network (VPN) that offers dedicated [non-contended] access into the cloud backed by a 99.995 per cent service level agreement around the network part and 100 per cent for the [hosted] infrastructure, in the same way as it would be on the customer side with dual-homing etc," he said. "If it [the application] is really mission-critical you could have carrier-grade SLAs with a connectivity element for the datacentre."

Both Tsvyatkov and McCloskey agree it is the increasing use of cloud-based apps and services by consumers that is pushing their increased adoption in the enterprise. This means IT departments need to consider whether they are happy to trade off security and performance concerns against the flexibility, which leasing SaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) can provide.

"Enterprises have to accept they are in competition with the best consumer tools out there, and they have to think about taking on a massive piece of enterprise technology, and making it secure and reliable, or giving consumer technology a chance to see whether it can do the same job," said Tsvyatkov.

"Cloud is here today in the consumer world, and it is here to stay - it is central to the growth of IT," added McCloskey.

"People expect their working environment to be the same as it is at home, but it is not. In the majority of [enterprise] cases, you do not get that slick environment."