“The cloud infrastructure is down today" is a phrae that could send shivers down any CEO’s spine–and yet, it’s been a common occurrence recently. On Apr. 26, an outage caused by fire and exacerbated by water damage disrupted Google’s Cloud service, impacting Western Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, and South Carolina in the U.S. This was the second major incident in 2023 after the Microsoft Azure outage on January 25th which prevented millions of users accessing Outlook and Teams.
One in four I.T. leaders believe infrastructure outages are the most likely source of disruption for their organization, according to a recent report from Splunky. Such outages have an estimated cost of $365,000 per hour of downtime for businesses. Perhaps more worryingly, half of the respondents’ organizations don’t have a digitally resilient infrastructure designed to mitigate or outright prevent the impact of a cloud service outage.
