ANN ARBOR – Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing internet access to roughly 40 percent of the U.S. market, crashed on Tuesday afternoon for about five hours, unplugging millions of business websites that serve tens of millions of clients. Online Tech CEO Yan Ness said chief information officers are still picking up the pieces today, and are also trying to figure out how they can avoid the destruction caused by this digital tornado.
“This was not about the Amazon outage,” Ness said Wednesday, “but how not to lose control when businesses use the public cloud. For us, our message is that we help CIOs rest easy by enabling them to seize control of their IT.”
Ann Arbor-based Online Tech provides its clients a hybrid cloud environment with a suite of managed security and disaster recovery services. Unlike public cloud providers, Ness said, Online Tech provides protection against hardware failures and doesn’t require application code to be written to utilize their multiple sites for failover and backup.
In his analysis of the AWS outage, he noted that Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides the building blocks for many of their other services. When S3 failed, this foundation crumbled, leading to widespread downtime across the internet. “Even AWS’ dashboard crashed because it was tied to S3, so CIOs had no way of knowing what was going on, and, more importantly, how long the outage would last,” Ness said.
“The promise of the public cloud is scalability and agility.” Ness said. “But the outage yesterday provided many businesses with a reality check. Expensive code rewrites and complex engineering are required to realize those benefits and maintain uptime.”
For more information about Online Tech’s hybrid cloud and disaster recovery services, visit www.onlinetech.com. If you have an immediate need, please contact Online Tech’s Hybrid Cloud Specialist Michelle Morse, at [email protected] or at 734-775-1503.
