When Clouds Fail

July 6, 2010

No matter how large your data center, how much disaster recovery planning you do, how much replication and fail-over hardware and software you have, how many monitoring tools you have, what best practices process you use, or how many people you have, if you’re hosting applications, you will have unscheduled downtime.

As a SaaS / Cloud vendor, everything you do is risk mitigation, but you cannot have complete certainty — whether you are an expansion stage software company or Google.

This is a fact that senior management teams of SaaS and cloud providers and of their customers should never forget.

It is a fact nicely illustrated by CRN, with their review of the 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2010 (So far). Oh the fond memories…

On the flip side, this means opportunity for entrepreneurs in data center management and disaster recovery, since uptime can always be improved, and new software tools to help can (and will) still be developed.

Senior Director Project Management

Igor Altman is Senior Director of Product Management at <a href="https://www.mdsol.com/en/">Medidata Solutions</a>, a leading global provider of cloud-based clinical development solutions that enhance the efficiency of customers’ clinical trials. Prior to Medidata, he worked at OpenView focusing on new investments in the IT space.