IT departments at fault for major cloud services disruptions

Monday, May 23, 2011

Despite the widespread interpretation of recent cloud outages as evidence of the technology's instability, InformationWeek writer Andrew Conry Murray says that this ignores the role of IT departments in the failures.

Instead of asserting that the cloud model itself is at fault, Murray writes, companies should view incidents like the recent Amazon EC2 and Microsoft BPOS outages - at least one of which was undoubtedly the product of human error, not faulty cloud computing - as evidence that these issues could have happened in both cloud and non-cloud settings.

The private cloud, according to Murray, can be improved by learning from the public cloud's mistakes, and the latter system must still be considered for functions that a corporate IT department simply can't handle on its own.

Some have leveled the accusation that cloud computing's detractors have been quick to label any major IT security breach as the fault of the cloud, rather than as simple errors that could affect any computer system.