9 Spectacular Cloud Computing Fails
For some of you, the cloud failures listed here may simply highlight areas where cloud service providers need to grow or adapt in order to better service their customers. For others, the examples may be more personal, as your data or applications may have been affected.
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Most of us have heard about at least one spectacular cloud failure, and some of us have been directly affected by one. While cloud technologies and security mechanisms continue to mature, they still suffer the same types of issues as in-house infrastructures. The primary difference, however, is that cloud failures impact many more users than an in-house problem would and therefore have greater visibility when problems occur.
Failures that plague cloud service providers tend to fall into one of three main categories:
"Beginner mistakes" on the part of service providers. This is when the provider starts out or grows at a rate faster than can be properly managed its by data center staff. Cloud giants, including Amazon Web Services and Google Compute, were often plagued with outages early on as each company grew at incredible rates. Even Microsoft, which entered the cloud game later than the others, ran into outage problems early and often.
Security flaws that hackers eventually expose. Because clouds are massive in scale compared with private data centers, they're much bigger targets for hackers. Cloud companies learned this lesson in a series of mistakes that exposed customer data on several occasions. Security breaches are a major concern among cloud computing customers, and many enterprise organizations are wary of handing over data protection responsibilities to a third-party service provider.
Poor processes within the cloud. Processes such as inadequate security audits, poor backup procedures, and administrators with inappropriate access to servers are all procedural problems that could be avoided. Unfortunately, these non-technical problems commonly are overlooked until it's too late.
For some of you, the cloud failures listed here may simply highlight areas where cloud service providers need to grow or adapt in order to better service their customers. For others, the examples may be more personal, as your data or applications may have been affected. Either way, we'd love to hear which cloud failures you found to be the most spectacular and why. Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
One of the first major companies to use Amazon's AWS cloud services was Netflix. In so many ways, the Netflix/AWS relationship was ideal: On the one hand, there was Netflix, whose streaming services were growing far faster than the company could maintain with internal IT resources; on the other, retail giant Amazon was on the bleeding edge of the cloud computing movement and ready to make a splash with its new venture. Unfortunately, the Netflix outage, which took place on Christmas Eve, was so widely publicized and impacted so many people that this single event arguably set the entire enterprise cloud movement back several steps.
Dropbox allowed anyone to access customer data simply by entering an email address of said customer. No password was needed. This huge security misstep, caused by a bug in a code update, did not last mere minutes, but for nearly four hours before it was discovered and fixed.
Some cloud providers offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools designed to secure a customer's online presence and improve website uptime. As is sometimes the case, the SaaS cloud that is supposed to help improve uptime has the exact opposite effect. Such was the case when CloudFlare's edge routers were upgraded simultaneously, which caused them all to crash. As a result, approximately 785,000 customer websites were unavailable for about an hour.
When cloud data breaches affect everyday people -- or even corporations -- the news rarely hits the mainstream media. But when these data breaches affect celebrities, it becomes worldwide news. When celebrity photos were being stolen due to a flaw in Apple's iCloud platform, it was plastered all over the media. Sometimes it takes high-profile incidents for service providers to pay attention and fix their bugs..
There are two IT-related events that can bring a company to a complete standstill. One is a total Internet outage; the other is a company email outage. Microsoft and its Office 365 cloud platform have been guilty of the latter several times since the service first launched. It got so bad that the running joke was that the service should be called Office 360, since it's not available five days out of the year.
A solid four years after Amazon launched its cloud services, Microsoft entered the market with Azure. Considering that Microsoft had plenty of time to reflect on, and learn from, mistakes made by trailblazers Amazon and Google, you'd think it would have learned a thing or two about avoiding cloud outages. Unfortunately, it seems that Microsoft wanted to learn from its own mistakes, instead, and suffered some significant -- and avoidable -- outages early on.
When you think of large-scale service providers, Joyent is one of the biggest. And because of that, one would think that policies, procedures, and access controls in such large data centers would be rock solid. Then again, we're all human. Word quickly spread as to the cause of a 2014 outage that lasted about an hour. Reportedly, a single Joyent systems administrator was responsible for simultaneously rebooting every server instance in its data center. Oops!
Oh, the irony. Enterprise administrators around the globe use LastPass -- a provider of cloud-based single sign-on and password managers -- to manage and secure passwords across their infrastructure. In June, LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist admitted in a blog post that a network compromise resulted in the theft of customer email addresses and password reminders. Although the passwords were encrypted, and there was no evidence of customer data being exposed, LastPass required all customers to change their master passwords the very next time they logged in.
Probably the most widely publicized technology failure of the past few years was the United States Healthcare.gov website launch. From the start, the website was plagued with technical glitches and major security holes. And while the cloud can't be blamed for all the problems that were encountered, outages in Verizon's Terremark cloud certainly looked to be a contributing factor early on.
As with all advancements in technology, major changes in IT architecture come with bumps in the road. While many of the outages listed in this slideshow could have been avoided, they're really par for the course. As time moves on, advances in automation and security will help to reduce these types of spectacular cloud failures. For our sakes, let's hope so.
As with all advancements in technology, major changes in IT architecture come with bumps in the road. While many of the outages listed in this slideshow could have been avoided, they're really par for the course. As time moves on, advances in automation and security will help to reduce these types of spectacular cloud failures. For our sakes, let's hope so.
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