Page 151 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

IT REORG ANIZES

age of virtual machines and the team will be charged only for
the hours that they use them, not the acquisition costs.
Business applications conducting financial transactions
are the opposite. They are the core of the business, the data
they deal with is sensitive, and if they go down for 44 minutes,
as part of an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data cen-

ter did recently, the loss to the business is immediate. As of
today, the IT staff can’t afford to let these mission-critical
processes go outside its direct control and risk their going
down during an outage in the cloud.
Cloud suppliers can argue that their data centers are less
likely to go down than the average corporate data center. The
marvelous Google search engine always seems to be available,

any time of day anywhere in the world. And yet Google’s widely
used Gmail application experienced several short outages in
2009, prompting widespread negative reactions among its
users. Google has few peers when it comes to the quality of the
cloud services that it provides, so Google outages have to be
taken as a warning that such events may occur with any sup-
plier. For example, Workday, a supplier of financial manage-
ment and cash management applications, experienced an
outage of 15 hours on September 24, 2009. Microsoft, another

supplier of online services with deep expertise and resources
behind it, saw its Bing search engine go off the air for half an
hour on December 3, 2009. The outage was caused by “a con-
figuration change during internal testing,” according to
Microsoft. The change caused Bing to fail when it was put back
in production. This type of configuration error—a human

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