Amazon’s Cloud Outage: Why You Should Plan for a Server Rental Contingency

Cloud computing is the much lauded brain-child of the future – nearly all companies are on board – and the virtualization migration cannot be denied.

But what happens when the unexpected happens and an outage occurs?

Even the big dogs have their bad days – and such was the case with a recent, highly-publicized server crash over at Amazon.com.

While Amazon’s EC2 cloud business is a relatively small percentage of its overall dealings, the company still has a reputation to uphold. And solvency is a key part of the image it wants to convey to both stockholders and customers.

Salesforce, SAP and other monumental tech giants are gaining ground on the cloud movement and the question becomes – what are they doing to prepare for similar failures?

When businesses rest their laurels on a third-party administered, cloud-based system, they  would be best served by a reassurance that their service is going to be continuous – even in the unlikely scenario that Amazon just lived out.

And that is where a server rental can come in handy.

You might not think it, but there are some high-end servers out there that companies can rent in the event of just such a disaster. Some of the nicer models are manufactured by IBM or Sun, and we carry a wide range of them here at Vernon Computer Source.

Some of these machines are valuable indeed and range up to six figures in cost – so it’s easy to see why a company, even one as glamorous as Amazon, might hesitate to purchase such an expensive on-premise option.

But companies large and small can always opt to rent a server instead of purchasing one flat out for just that reason. They can get all of the performance and the reliability of an upper tier, name-brand device without the cost.

And it’s not uncommon that we see a conglomeration forming in the face of contingency – where two, perhaps even three respectable businesses will join together to fund a “contingency pool,” to ensure that just such a server is always on hand.

This tactic, sometimes known as “second sourcing,” is one that’s employed by IT project managers across the globe.

Just in case.