Should Your Company be a Multi-Cloud Company?

Posted on May 25, 2012

Posted by Gerben Meijer in Cloud Performance 1 Comment

Having options in life is important, it’s even more important when dealing with critical information.

With any sort of business operation it’s important not to invest everything in one company, when dealing with cloud computing it’s no different. It’s important to cover your bases. What happens if there is an accident and your website is down, the data center you stored your information is experiencing an issue. You didn’t have a back up plan, there is no “other” data center that has your computing information. So now, you’re website is down until that gets fixed- but how long will that take?

If you had been using two cloud providers, this could’ve been avoided. By making a cloud provider with better performance your main provider, you’ll most likely be able to limit any down time. But, to cover your bases you should also put a backup of your website in a cheaper provider, one that you can seamlessly and automatically switch to if your main server goes down.

By rolling up two servers at different companies you’re able to ensure you will never, ever, go down – which is what you want after all, right?

In a recent article on GigaOM, Mark Thiele brought up some great points on why organizations should look into using multiple cloud providers: “Any single technology platform brings with it the risk that a single platform specific issue could adversely affect the whole. I’ve seen too many problems occur in production, even after successful testing, and the reality is that in most cases you just can’t test against every potential environment or use scenario. So, yes the risk remains, regardless of zoning or regional distribution. As the saying goes, the strength of a chain is dependent on the weakest link.”

It may seem time consuming to develop an IT plan allowing for multiple cloud providers, but wouldn’t you rather be safe than sorry?

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Comments

1 Response to Should Your Company be a Multi-Cloud Company?

5 Ways to Deal with Website Downtime - SSD Cloud Computing News and Industry Blog says: September 11, 2012 at 5:00 pm

[...] Switch over to your backup. Hopefully you’ve taken our advice and backed up with a different provider, if that’s the case your automatic recovery would kick in instantly – never giving [...]