Gartner says companies should not shy away from cloud migration. According to the IT consulting firm, these services are unlikely to ever go down for long periods of time, reports The Register.
We recently reported on a Google Cloud datacenter outage in Paris. Since then, the problem is said to have been fixed, although Google is still sorting out the impact with affected customers. The incident shows that not every outage is resolved overnight, even though there always seems to be a failover in support.
According to MD of Gartner Technical Professionals Alan Waite, these problems are usually contained. Even in a major outage, the actions of organizations to continue operating locally would have little effect. Therefore, companies need to rely on the resiliency features of the cloud service in question, according to Waite at the IT conference hosted by Gartner in Sydney.
Trusting the cloud
Ultimately, the choice of cloud provider is not that different from options in other areas of IT, Waite believes. At issue is vendor management, where the fear among businesses is that reliance on cloud leads to what is known as a “lock-in,” where organizations have less choice of other services. “If you’ve worked in IT for any period of time, you’ve always been locked in in some way,” Waite said.
“Perhaps it was Cisco for your network. You were happy to accept that lock-in because those vendors gave you fantastic capabilities that you could leverage and use. Cloud providers are exactly the same. There’s no difference in lock-in to a cloud vendor. People accept lock-in understanding the risks that are involved with it. And they manage those risks. And they accept it because they get fantastic capabilities from their cloud provider.”
In terms of resilience efforts, Waite recommends another cloud that, in simplified form, maintains an organization’s functioning. For many organizations, it will be challenging to let go of the on-prem situation. For example, banks, hospitals and legal firms handle highly sensitive data. Waite cites a comparison to airline traffic in this area. After all, he argues, we rely on the security of an aeroplane without being in control of everything ourselves. In that area, he estimates that on-prem work is like driving a car: more dangerous and slower than flying.
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