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number of experts recommend that companies for February 28, 2011; Ashlee Vance, “The Cloud: Battle of the Tech
whom an outage would be a major risk consider using Titans.” Bloomberg Businessweek (March 3, 2011); Peter Svensson;
Steve Lohr, “Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts,”
another computing service as a backup.
The New York Times, April 22, 2011; Charles Babcock. “Post Mortem:
Still, cloud computing has finally gone When Amazon’s Cloud Turned on Itself,” Information Week, April
mainstream, and the major cloud providers have 29, 2011; Patrick Thibodeau, “Amazon Cloud Outage Was Triggered
the sales numbers to prove it. Amazon, Microsoft, by Configuration Error, “Computerworld, April 29, 2011; and Charles
Babcock, “Zynga’s Unusual Cloud Strategy is Key To Success,”
Google, and other cloud providers will have to
Information Week, July 1, 2011.
continue to work to avoid outages, while other
companies must decide whether the cloud is right
CASE STUDY QUESTIONS
for them, and if so, how to most effectively use the
cloud to enhance their businesses. 1. What business benefits do cloud computing
services provide? What problems do they solve?
Sources: Charles Babcock, “How Game-Maker Zynga Became a
Cloud Vendor,” Information Week, May 14, 2012; Charles Babcock, 2. What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?
“Cloud’s Thorniest Question: Does It Pay Off?” Information Week, 3. How do the concepts of capacity planning,
June 4, 2012; Zack Whittaker, “Amazon Explains Latest Cloud Outage:
scalability, and TCO apply to this case? Apply
Blame the Power,” ZDNet, June 18, 2012; Stuart J. Johnston, “Cloud
Outage of 13 Providers Reveals Downtime Costs,” searchcloud- these concepts both to Amazon and to subscribers
of its services.
computing.com, June 22, 2012; Charles Babcock, “4 Companies
Getting Real Results from Cloud Computing,” Information 4. What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit
Week, January 15, 2011; Charles Babcock, “Amazon Launches from using cloud computing? Why?
CloudFormation to Simplify App Development,” Information Week,

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