INTELLIGENT CLOUD
Last year Verizon suffered a breach that
resulted in the personal data of six million
customers being leaked online. The cause?
A misconfigured setting on a cloud server
owned by a third-party. That’s six million
people, potentially more, unhappy with
Verizon. Then Verizon itself unhappy with
a vendor. And the media swirling around
all of them, with questions aplenty and
blame to apportion.
Similarly, when GitLab suffered a
database outage, 5,000 projects and 700
customers were affected, according to
their own postmortem statement, causing
huge problems for a sizeable chunk of the
provider’s user base.
The problem for cloud service providers
is that expectations around the quality and
Mohamad Rizk, Manager System Engineers,
Middle East at Veeam.
major global business, it is vital that
providers stop the tide of damaging
outages, and place as much emphasis on
availability and backup for customers as
they do growth and acquisition. That is
tomorrow’s cloud battleground.
Cloud provision is a vast and growing
market. Forrester estimates that it will
be worth $178 billion in 2018, up from
$146 billion in 2017, and things are
getting fiercely competitive. For all that, it
remains the case that AWS is dominant,
with some experts predicting ownership
of approximately 35% of the market.
Meaning that prominent incumbent brand
name providers and ambitious newcomers
are all competing for comparatively small
portions of the pie.
This explains the ambitious business
growth and customer acquisition plans
many providers have been executing
over the past couple of years. A spate of
recent mergers, including ANS acquiring
Webantic and McAfee taking on Skyhigh,
demonstrates how leading tech firms are
trying to diversify their cloud offering and
strengthen their arm in a market that is
demanding more and more.
The question everyone involved in
cloud has to answer, however, is how do
you support the customers who are already
on board?
34
The question
everyone
involved in cloud
has to answer,
is how do you
support the
customers who
are already on
board?
availability of cloud services are on the
rise. Countless individuals and businesses
are placing their trust in specialist cloud
service providers, and they expect their
data, tools and applications to be stored
securely and available precisely when they
need them to be.
The upshot of those expectations is
that errors, such as those encountered
by Verizon and GitLab, quickly become
viewed as unacceptable. Businesses
let down by cloud partners are liable
to take their customers elsewhere.
While individual customers who suffer
availability issues and have projects
derailed by issues with their cloud service
provider are likely to do the same.
Breaches, outages and hacks can quite
easily lead to the flight of enterprise and
SME customers, particularly as provider
switching gets easier and competition
fiercer. So, it is up to cloud service
providers to ensure that their service will
not let customers down.
As it becomes more important to
differentiate in the cloud provision
market, one of the primary areas a cloud
service provider can sell itself is in making
assurances about service availability,
data protection and backup. In other
words, removing the risk of things that let
customers down and make the news in the
process, as much as possible.
For example, were Verizon’s
unfortunate cloud partner to have had a
cloud backup solution decoupled from
its primary infrastructure, perhaps the
human error that led to the six million
user leak might not have had such
profound consequences.
Similarly, had GitLabs’ data been
supported by an immediate database
recovery solution, those 5,000 projects
might have remained on track.
While, on the smaller end of the
spectrum, if HitChat’s cloud tier had
been better supported, service disruption
might not have been so bad after the
service was hacked.
Of course, it is easy to provide wisdom
with hindsight. But these counterfactual
examples of what might have been are all
about giving cloud service providers the
best chance to survive problems with their
service in the future. And helping them to
retain the customers they have worked so
hard to acquire.
In the simplest terms, we cannot
do anything about the hacks that
continuously disrupted 2017 now.
However, we can learn from them, so
that 2018’s biggest outages lists might be
harder to compile. And when the solution
to so many of the biggest challenges
in technology is simply harnessing the
power of cloud backup to support cloud
provision, it seems foolish not to take
some positive action.
Issue 16
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS