Amazon S3’s Outage

Amazon’s S3 service suffered an outage for a few hours, so what? Well this raises a few queries in general about Software-As-A-Service (SaaS), basically if you are depending on someone to provide a service then it needs to be there all the time, as reliably as the dial-tone on the ‘phone. If not, then you lose business - and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) might not help.

“SLA’s just make money for lawyers they won’t guarantee you remain in business”

So, when looking at SaaS also look at the risks and consequences as well. If all your data is stored by a third party and that third party is down is there anything you can do, or will you just be twiddling your thumbs? Look very closely at the SLA and translate the uptime into actual time, 99% uptime means the service could be down 87 hours a year, or 10 working days! Look closely at whether this includes planned downtime (when they do upgrades) or other outages.

SaaS is a great way for smaller companies to get ‘Big IT’ benefits - but check the small print.

March 3, 2008 | Filed Under Availability 

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