Cloud Outages Cost More than $71M Since 2007: Report

For cloud vendors, providing reliable service to meet the requirements of mission-critical systems in the business world is of the utmost importance. Availability is one area where organizations cannot afford to compromise when it comes to cloud-based services.

Yet a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 had an economic impact of more than $71.7 million, according to a new report released by the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR).

OVH and NaviSite (News - Alert) had the greatest number of unavailability hours, according to the report, which lists Amadeus and Facebook as having the greatest availability. Other vendors cited in the report are: ServerBeach, PayPal, Google, Yahoo, Twitter (News - Alert), Amazon, Microsoft, Hostway and Blackberry.

The costs for an hour-long outage can vary from $89,000 at a travel service provider such as Amadeus, to $225,000 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 (News - Alert) and Amazon amount to an estimated $200,000 an hour, according to the group.

The IWGCR, which was formed in March by Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University, published the first Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing (ARWC), which found that the average unavailability of cloud services is estimated to 10 hours per year or more; average availability is estimated to 99.9 percent or less.

However, these figures are based on early estimates, according to research officials.

“The Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing provides an initial estimate of the average availability of cloud computing services,” said Laurent Séguin, coordinator of IWGCR.

The average unavailability of public cloud services can be estimated to 10 hours per year or more, according to Yingjie XU, PhD student at Paris 13 University. The estimate is comparable to 15 minutes of average unavailability of domestic electricity in a city the size of Paris.

However, the study only takes into account cloud outages that were reported in the media, Paris 13 officials said.

“Current ranking relies on public press reports. Cloud incidents which were not reported by [the] press were not taken into account. The number of users hit by an outage was also not taken into account due to the lack of public data,” said Christophe Cérin, professor at Paris 13 University and coordinator of IWGCR.

To better assess cloud availability in the future, the group said it plans to adopt new methods for future research.

“Our procedure to gather information is far from exhaustive. The consequence is ranking of availability becomes unreliable,” the report said. “In next version, we will use Google (News - Alert) Alarms or advanced economic intelligence softwares to fetch news automatically.”

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