On Sunday 2nd June, Google experienced outages on its cloud platform. The issue caused widespread disruption to Google’s services such as YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Docs, Hangouts and Voice, as well as third party apps which rely on the cloud, including Snapchat and Apple’s iCloud.
The issue was said to be down to a small “configuration change”, which was intended for a small number of servers in one region. However, this was incorrectly applied to a large number of servers across numerous other regions, which caused network capacity issues and major congestion. Although the error was detected within seconds, the network’s issues persevered for hours, which had a significant impact across all Google services for some users. For instance, it was reported that around 1% of active Gmail users experienced problems, representing millions of users. YouTube also saw a 10% decrease in global views, whilst Google Cloud Storage saw a 30% drop in traffic.
Whilst major outages like this are relatively rare, it goes to show that even the biggest names in cloud computing can suffer from downtime. So, if you’ve chosen to host your ICT infrastructure in a major public cloud platform such as Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure and hold the belief that such a well-known brand name offers you improved reliability, unfortunately you could end up disappointed sooner or later. That’s because no single cloud platform can ever guarantee 100% availability. Indeed, with all your eggs in one cloud (so to speak), it’s important to consider the risk you’re taking should that cloud suddenly and unexpectedly become unavailable.
The future is multi-cloud
When it comes to cloud computing, the old adage is true and two clouds are never exactly the same. Each vendor solution has its own benefits and, with a single cloud approach, straight away you are being forced to make concessions. As the Google cloud outage proves, you also have to think about risk. Naturally, when one cloud goes down, your services which rely on it also go down.
On the other hand, by creating a multi-cloud strategy, you can leverage the benefits of multiple cloud offerings while reducing the availability risks associated with a one-vendor approach. Although a multi-cloud strategy is often pursued because of its reliability benefits, the approach can also provide a number of other benefits, including improved flexibility and higher data security.
The future is Viia
Viia is NVT Group’s private cloud platform, which has been designed by our technologists to be a reliable, secure, affordable and scalable virtual technology infrastructure solution. It is delivered as a service, with full support from NVT Group.
Not only does Viia offer you all the benefits you traditionally associate with cloud computing, including high performance computing and easier to manage costs, but Viia can also be configured to meet your exact business requirements. Indeed, Viia is a solution that offers the best of all worlds. That’s because Viia integrates with all major public cloud platforms and your existing on-premise and hypervisor technologies.
Viia offers the right combination of on-premise and in-cloud infrastructure and can be reconfigured as your needs and preferences change. It means your business can take appropriate steps to the cloud, so there is no risk of you completing the transition before you’re ready and it can also help avoid unnecessary delays along the way.
As the infographic below illustrates, the true beauty of Viia is that it enables you to create an intelligent multi-cloud solution. In this example, Viia sits somewhere in the middle between traditional on-premise and traditional cloud infrastructure solutions, providing 360 degree integration with both, thereby acting as an effective pathway to whatever cloud (or multi-cloud) is best for you.
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