AWS (Amazon Web Services) is experiencing a major outage today. AWS is the backbone of much of the internet's website and web applications, causing the outage to impact a large portion of the internet.
We don’t yet know the cause of this outage. What we do know is that this is just the latest example of why employing a multi-cloud strategy is so important for business resilience. So much of business is done online, that an outage of even just a few hours can cost up to $300,000 an hour on average. Businesses are reliant upon consistent connectivity and performance to ensure their own systems and applications remain functional so they can keep employees online and customers connected. This especially rings true for e-commerce companies. With less anticipated in-person traffic in stores around the world, online holiday shopping is already surging, and any time offline can have a critical impact on a company’s bottom line.
Even depending on a service as stable and reliable as AWS is no guarantee of 100% up-time, and no business should put their full faith in a single cloud provider. Internet infrastructure can be unpredictable, especially when world events are driving unprecedented traffic and network congestion. It is more important than ever to diversify infrastructure at every level. Employing a multi-cloud strategy can help mitigate the impact of a cloud service provider’s outage and ensure your business remains running when others are not with automated failover systems that can route traffic to a better-performing provider.
What is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?
A multi-cloud strategy is the use of two or more Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or SaaS providers to run enterprise workloads. Using more than one cloud provider, whether they are public or private, allows you to switch between providers for optimal performance.
How it Improves Resilience
While the major cloud providers like AWS offer multi-zone high availability to shield you from disaster in a specific data center, there are smaller issues and errors that could bring your systems down. When running on two cloud providers with redundancy, if anything goes wrong with one, you can divert traffic to the other, reducing or eliminating costly downtime. With the proper redundancy offered by a multi-cloud configuration, when one cloud provider goes down, you remain available.
Overcome the Challenge of Managing Multi-Cloud Environments with Intelligent DNS
Managing multiple cloud environments can be complex. You have to carefully match applications to cloud capabilities, monitor performance and costs, and automate low-level maintenance tasks.
Companies can minimize the risk of downtime by implementing DNS-based traffic management strategies that incorporate real-time data about network conditions and resource availability with real user measurement data. This enables IT teams to deploy new infrastructure and manage the use of resources to route around problems or accommodate unexpected traffic spikes.
Learn how NS1 helps you use intelligent DNS for multi-cloud success.