Lightening Strike

A recent story that hit the news talked about how the only Amazon server for europe had been knocked out by a lightening strike. Amazon had warned it’s customers that they could be offline for up to 48 hours as they struggled to recover from the power disruption. It took 3 hours to recover from the first of the affected instances, but after 12 hours a quarter still remained offline, with knock on effects slowing their likely recovery time.

In light of this, it is of most importance to have backup plans that can be put in to place should these very unlikely natural disasters occur, or any other disasters for that matter. For instances such as lightening, a simple surge protector can do the job. If back up plans are not made and events such as fire, lightening, rioting, flooding, or power outages occur then business may not be able to trade or function, especially if everything (data) is stored in the cloud.

Further more to this issue, another article talks about how there are seven things in particular.

  1. Read your cloud provider SLA very carefully
  2. Don’t take your providers assurances for granted
  3. Most customers will forgive a company for it’s failings
  4. There are many ways you can supplement and cloud provider’s resilience
  5. Building in extra resilience comes at a cost
  6. Understanding the trade-offs helps you frame what to ask
  7. Lack of transparency may be a companies ‘Achilles Heel’