09-12-18 | Blog Post

3 lessons we learned from the Microsoft Azure outage

Blog Posts

data center outage.jpgNow that we’ve had some time to recover from last week’s Microsoft Azure outage, we can look back and ask, “What happened?!” Microsoft has released a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) explaining the incident, but what else have we learned from the incident? Below are three key takeaways from the event.

Public cloud providers aren’t immune to outages

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, but no one is immune to downtime. It can happen to anyone, anywhere. Even with all of the redundancies built in, it only takes a second to fail, or in this case, a lightning strike to shut down a data center.

Multi cloud is key

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Although the public cloud is still incredibly reliable and it’s not like you shouldn’t use it, distributing your workloads among several clouds can help protect your business if one of them goes down. It’s an extra layer of redundancy that many businesses are investing in.

Recover, recover, recover

The ability to adapt during an outage is critical, and that’s where disaster recovery comes in. Get a plan in place that takes outages into account, and determine the maximum amount of time you can afford to be down. Set up a recovery site that will allow you to quickly fail over and keep operations running while you wait for your cloud provider to come back online.

Another question we might ask: What has Microsoft themselves learned from their Microsoft Azure outage and how will they move forward? Most of the affected services were Azure’s own. If an application requires use of Visual Studio Team Services and VS isn’t functioning, then the application won’t run, period. What can Microsoft do to ensure this type of scenario doesn’t happen?

Final thoughts

The public cloud is here to stay and plays a critical role in how businesses operate, but just because you put your workloads in Azure or Google, doesn’t mean you aren’t susceptible to downtime. Consider a multi cloud solution to help distribute your environment and keep you running all the time. Don’t forget about disaster recovery. Are your applications replicated to more than one data center or region?

Online Tech can help you architect a multi-cloud solution that fits your business needs and protects you from outages. Go above and beyond with our Disaster Recovery as a Service. Want to learn more? Contact us to talk to a cloud expert.

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