As technical problems interrupted offsite data storage provided by Amazon for a second day on Friday, industry analysts said the troubles will prompt many companies to reconsider relying on remote computers beyond their control.
“This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst for the research firm IDC, who used the term for accessing services and information in big data centers remotely over the Internet from anywhere, as if the services were in a cloud. “It will force a conversation in the industry.”
That discussion, he said, will likely center around what data and computer operations to send off to the cloud and what to keep inside the corporate walls.
But another issue, Eastwood said, will be a re-examination of the contracts that cover cloud services — how much to pay for backup and recovery, including paying extra for data centers in different locations. That’s because the companies apparently hit hardest by the interruption were startups that are focused on moving fast in pursuit of growth and would be less apt to pay for extensive back-up and recovery services.
Amazon’s cloud computing service has thousands of corporate customers from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers.
The problems companies reported ranged from being unable to access data to service interruptions to sites being shut down.
Amazon has data centers around the world, but the current problems have come from its big center in northern Virginia, near Dulles airport. Amazon’s webpage on the status of its cloud services said Friday that things were improving but still not resolved. A company spokeswoman said the updates would be Amazon’s only comment for now.
The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data center services, was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But cloud computing, like airline travel, he noted, is safer than traveling in a car — which compares with data centers run by individual companies.
