Single point of failure: The hidden cost of the cloud

If today’s outage at AWS (Amazon Web Services) has shown us anything it’s how reliant we all are on the likes of Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Alphabet for many of the online services we more or less take for granted.

We’re seeing reports of outages from a diverse set of businesses including the likes of Snapchat, PlayStation Network, Coinbase, Substack, Lloyds Banking Group and even parts of the HMRC website don’t appear to be working as they should.

This outage raises serious questions as to the wisdom of companies, and other important institutions, outsourcing some, or all, of their core business infrastructure to a small subset of third-party vendors in order to save money on hosting it themselves.

On an economic level it's almost akin to putting all of your economic eggs in one basket.

While it saves money on employing your own IT staff as well as hosting your own infrastructure it can also put the business at risk if that third party service experiences an outage, or even a cyberattack.  

Certainly, this growth in cloud-based services has helped to propel companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet to multi trillion-dollar valuations, and their share prices to ever dizzying heights, but at what cost if it comes to localising a large part of our economic model to single points of failure.

The fact that today’s outage has caused so much disruption across such a diverse set of businesses should be a warning that outsourcing critical business functions has its risks, not only for the business itself, but for the rest of us as well.

Many of these businesses also hold sensitive personal data on all of us, all of which is likely to be located on these same cloud services.

The fact that today’s outage has caused so much disruption should be a warning that outsourcing critical business functions has its risks, and it’s something that ought to worry all of us.

A hacker merely needs to target one, or all three of the big cloud service providers to cause massive disruption to everyday life, with all of the risks to economic stability that brings.

Amazon, and all other cloud services need to do better, and businesses that use their services need to hold them to account for today’s outage, as well as any future issues.