Gartner states that companies should not shy away from cloud migration. According to the IT consultancy firm, it is unlikely that these services will ever be unavailable for a long period of time, The Register reports.
Recently, a Google Cloud data center in Paris experienced an outage. The issue has now been resolved, though Google is still assessing the impact on affected customers. This incident demonstrates that not all outages can be quickly remedied, even if there is a failover system in place.
At an IT conference hosted by Gartner in Sydney, Alan Waite, MD of Gartner Technical Professionals, said that these issues are usually contained. Even in the event of a major outage, organizations’ efforts to remain local would have little effect. Therefore, companies must rely on the resiliency features of the relevant cloud service.
Waite believes that the choice of cloud provider is not much different from other IT options. Organizations fear that depending on the cloud will lead to a so-called ‘lock-in’, in which they have less freedom of choice for other services. Waite said, “If you’ve worked in IT for a while, you’ve always been ‘locked in’ in some way. Maybe it was VMware in a data center. Maybe Cisco for your network. You accepted that lock-in wholeheartedly because these vendors offered you fantastic opportunities that you could use. It’s the same for cloud providers. That is no different [from other IT suppliers], because they receive fantastic options from their cloud provider.”
To ensure resilience, Waite suggests having a secondary cloud that, in a simplified form, maintains the functioning of an organization. For many organizations, it will be difficult to relinquish their on-premise setup. Banks, hospitals, and legal offices, for example, handle highly sensitive data. Waite compares this to air travel, noting that we trust the safety of an aircraft without having everything under our control. In this context, he believes that on-premise work is like driving a car: more dangerous and slower than flying.
