Last Tuesday, AWS S3 storage component went down for several hours and created outages for many cloud businesses using AWS. The outage was caused by human error, when an engineer mistakenly took down a larger set of servers than was scheduled. The error took down crucial underlying subsystems, removing storage capacity and causing the system to restart. If Amazon, the leader in cloud storage can have this issue, what does it tell us?
Dangers of Blindly Relying on the Cloud
As a cloud contact center owner, you cannot blindly trust vendors using AWS. Many vendors in the industry claim to have the best - or even 100% uptime - because they are using AWS and therefore inherit their elasticity, availability and scalability. Thousands of businesses were unreachable when Amazon had the outage because they forgot that in the end - there are hardware boxes running software and people are handling them.
Architecture Matters
If your business can't live with an outage, among other risk mitigation strategies in course of business continuity planning, you need to thoroughly vet the architecture of all the cloud vendors you use. There are several mission critical attributions you need:
- High Availability - proportion of time a system is in a functioning condition
- Reliability - probability of failure-free software operation for a specified period of time in a specified environment
- Scalability - ability to handle volume, respond to its changes, and have a high headroom for uninterrupted growth
Using AWS as a SaaS vendor doesn’t ensure uptime. Look deeper in the the architecture when selecting a partner. Bright Pattern offers enterprise-grade cloud contact center software with high uptime and availability. How do we do it?
