How Much Would a Cloud Outage Cost Your Business?

Veritas Technologies, a brand devoted to helping companies discover the truth in their data, recently published a new study into the state of cloud computing. The report, titled, "The Truth in Cloud" found that an alarming 77% of UK companies have no idea how much a cloud outage would could their business. Ultimately, organisations are woefully underprepared to deal with a cloud-based problem. Although many cloud service providers do what they can to keep outages and other problems to a minimum, most brands simply don't understand their own responsibilities when they transition to the cloud. The less an organisation knows about their cloud needs, the less prepared they'll be in the event of an unexpected malfunction.

The Truth About Cloud Outages

The Veritas study was conducted by Vanson Bourne and looked at approximately 1200 global IT decision makers and business leaders. The research found that almost all respondents (96%) will be moving their network into the cloud during the next 12-24 months.

However, while more people are actively moving towards the cloud, this doesn't necessarily mean that they know how to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities of a cloud environment. 38% of respondents said that they expect to deal with fewer than 15 minutes of monthly downtime, but the truth is that most organisations experience an average of at least 16 minutes.

Protecting Against a Cloud Outage

Interestingly, the Veritas report also revealed that 66% of today's companies believe that it's the responsibility of the cloud provider to deal with service interruptions. While most providers will have service level agreements to adhere to, end-users can have a part to play when securing their cloud experience too. After all, beyond the complications of an infrastructure-level outage, brands will also need to consider how much time it takes to

bring their applications back online.

The Chief Product Officer and Vice President for Veritas, Mike Palmer, noted that today's organisations obviously lack the knowledge they need to truly understand their cloud computing networks. In fact, a business would be able to immediately recover from a cloud outage if they simply took a more proactive approach to maintaining their uptime in the cloud.