Underestimated cloud failures

Companies continue to underestimate the impact of cloud failure on their own business. This is shown in a study by Veritas Technologies, a market leader in multi-cloud management.

For example, a large majority of respondents (60 percent, 57 percent in Germany) have not investigated the costs caused by a cloud outage. Data protection and business continuity solutions ensure that companies are "always on" in the cloud.

The service providers define clear specifications for the availability of their services, which are strongly oriented to the availability of the infrastructure. The study shows that most customers only see the cloud provider as having a duty to ensure resilience and underestimate their own responsibility to protect their critical business applications against downtime.

The Truth in Cloud" study was conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Veritas. As more companies migrate their services and data to the cloud, it is essential to understand how cloud outages impact their business.

36 percent of global respondents and 40 percent of Germans expect less than 15 minutes of downtime per month. However, one in three (31 percent) has already experienced more than double that amount of downtime (31 minutes or more) per month, and in Germany as many as one in four (25 percent).

Who is responsible?

Who is responsible for countermeasures in the event of a failure is also frequently misjudged: more than half of those surveyed (59 percent, 63 percent in Germany) see only the cloud service provider as being responsible.

Another 83 percent (81 percent in Germany) believe that their cloud service provider is solely responsible for protecting workloads and data in the cloud against outages.

Cloud service providers are subject to strict service level specifications - but these usually only apply to the infrastructure. In the event of a cloud failure, providers are only responsible for getting their infrastructure up and running. As soon as this is back online, it is also a matter of getting all the applications up and running again.