Cloud Downtime’s Cost: $70M Since 2007, Give or Take…
- Mike Barton
- posted in Blog, Featured ⋅ June 19, 2012 2:35 pm
The International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency found and reported on Monday that a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 cloud service biggies had since 2007 caused an economic impact of more than $71.7 million, reports said today.
The big takeaway from the report: With the cloud’s average cloud outages of 7.5 hours per year, the availability rate is 99.9% — a far cry from the oft-championed five-9s. “It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999%). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year,” the working group researchers noted in their paper (See PDF document.)
One big caveat with this finding: This first report by the group, formed in March of this year by Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University, is based on press reports of cloud outages. IDG News’ Loek Essers writes:
While the researchers noted that their methodology is imperfect because their information-gathering process was far from exhaustive, they said that the preliminary figures are most likely underestimated. Many outages are not published in the press, leaving a lot of room for missed outages, they said.
Essers notes “other caveats in the methodology used, including not having the precise value of the economic cost for each failure or an average hourly cost for each cloud service provider, the researchers said. Besides that, the group noted that its data was not based on the number of users a service has, which would be preferable.”
How did they get to their numbers?
The costs for an hour-long outage can vary from $89,000 at a travel service provider such as Amadeus, to $225 an hour for a service like Paypal, according to the research paper. The figures are based on hourly costs accepted by the industry, the researchers said. Outages at companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon amount to an estimated $200 an hour, according to the group.
Have your say: While the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency promised to improve its research methods, have they lost credibility by publishing such information?