Page 236 -

Chapter 5 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 235

99.9 percent uptime. On its own financial reports, IBM, Cisco, and other traditional data center
Zynga recognized that a significant majority of giants realize that cloud computing is a threat
its game traffic had been hosted by a single ven- to their technology infrastructure business. As a
dor and any failure or significant interruption in solution to rising computing costs, they have been
its network could negatively impact operations. steering their customers toward virtualization
Amazon Web Services had an outage for several software, which allows them to run many more
hours in April 2011 that made it impossible for applications on each individual server that they buy.
users to log into some of Zynga’s games. There are also many companies that simply have too
However, owning data centers also comes with much legacy technology to use the cloud effectively.
risks. If the demand for Zynga’s games were to For example, Credit Suisse has 7,000 software
drop dramatically, Zynga would have too much IT applications running on its systems that have been
infrastructure on its hands and losses could result. developed over the past 20 years. Ensuring that all of
The most likely scenario has Zynga owning part of these applications would work the same way in the
its data centers and relying on external services such cloud would be more trouble than it’s worth.
as Amazon for the rest. Many other companies share Zynga’s con-
Not all companies use cloud computing in the cern about cloud reliability and security, and this
same way that Zynga does, but many do. Outback remains a major barrier to widespread cloud adop-
Steakhouse wasn’t sure how popular an upcoming tion. Amazon’s cloud experienced significant out-
coupon promotion would be, so the company used ages in April and August 2011 and again on June
Microsoft’s Azure cloud to launch the promotion. 14 and 29, 2012. Normally, cloud networks are
Outback ended up selling an unexpectedly large very reliable, often more so than private networks
670,000 coupons. Using the cloud, it was able to operated by individual companies. But when a cloud
avoid taxing in-house systems unnecessarily. of significant size like Amazon’s goes down, it sends
InterContinental Hotels has revamped its ripples across the entire Web.
infrastructure to include both private and public According to Amazon, a simple network
cloud usage. To improve response time for custom- configuration error caused a major multiday service
ers, InterContinental moved its core room reserva- outage in Amazon’s East Coast region from April
tion transaction system onto a private cloud within 21–24, 2011. Amazingly, the error was most likely
its own data center, but it moved room availability a simple error made by a human being during a
and pricing Web site applications onto public cloud routine network adjustment. Sites affected included
data centers on the East and West coasts. In fact, Reddit, Foursquare, Engine Yard, HootSuite, Quora,
InterContinental hopes to put all of its publicly Zynga, and many more. On June 14 and June 29,
accessible information in these public clouds so 2012, AWS suffered outages due to power failures in
that customers receive faster results to site queries. its primary East Coast data center in North Virginia.
Customers receive data faster if the data are located Many popular Web sites, including Netflix, Heroku,
on a server that is physically close to them, and Quora, and Pinterest, as well as Web sites of smaller
cloud computing helps InterContinental to take companies, were knocked offline for hours.
advantage of this. The outages were proof that the vision of a cloud
Start-up companies and smaller companies are with 100 percent uptime is still far from reality.
finding that they no longer need to build a data Experts have conflicting opinions of how serious
center. With cloud infrastructures like Amazon’s this is. A June 2012 report issued by the Paris-based
readily available, they have access to technical International Working Group on Cloud Computing
capability that was formerly only available to much Resiliency estimated that the major cloud comput-
larger businesses. For example, online crafts market- ing services were down about 10 hours per year or
place Etsy uses Amazon computers to analyze data more, with average availability at 99.9 percent or less.
from the 1 billion monthly views of its Web site. Etsy Even this small amount of downtime can lead to large
can then use its findings to create product recom- revenue losses for firms that need 24/7 availability.
mendation systems that allow customers to rank Nevertheless, some large cloud users such as Netflix
which products they like best and to generate a list of believe that overall cloud service availability has
100 products they might enjoy. Etsy’s engineers and steadily improved. Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product
managers are excited about their ability to handle officer, believes the cloud is becoming more reliable,
these types of issues on someone else’s computer and that AWS gives Netflix much larger scale and
systems. technical expertise than it would have otherwise. A

MIS_13_Ch_05_Global.indd 235 1/17/2013 3:04:31 PM