Spreading the risk: using multicloud to make data storage safer
With distributed denial of service cyber attacks on the increase, and more outages occurring at cloud providers, many companies are adopting a multicloud strategy
Putting all your eggs into one basket is never a good idea, and the same could be said about companies using cloud providers to store data.
A case in point was the outage at Microsoft’s Azure cloud management system on February 29, 2012, affecting users in parts of the US and Europe for several hours.
On February 28 this year, an outage at the Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage service panicked IT departments, with websites and services - such as Imgur, Medium and the Docker Registry Hub - going offline and losing images.
The lesson here might be for companies to reduce their dependence on a single provider. After all, enterprises have a lot to lose when their site goes down.
In the search for higher “fault tolerance”, few firms rely on a single cloud provider. According to a recent study by Microsoft and 451 Research, nearly a third of organisations work with four or more cloud vendors.
By using multiple cloud services, enterprises increase their agility and automation. More and more companies are now re-strategising and adopting a multicloud system.
“In computing, redundancy is a good thing,” says Mart van de Ven, director and consultant at Droste, a data consultancy. “If one provider is ‘nuked’, our services would not be affected because [as a company using multiple providers] we are also running our services on another provider.”
