UK companies should be defining a ‘Minimum Viable Business’ in the wake of a near eight-hour Google outage, one expert has claimed.
Google yesterday confirmed that one of its three local availability zones in London suffered an “incident” that lasted from 7.08am to 3pm UK time.
The outage variously knocked out banking apps, shut café tills and briefly stopped patients booking appointments.
It comes as the growth of cloud computing continues to accelerate in the wake of the advent of AI.
Cloud infrastructure services spend leapt 43% to $143bn in Q2, marking the eleventh successive quarter that the year-on-year growth rate has increased, according to Synergy Research Group.
AWS, Microsoft and Google pocketed 28%, 20% and 15% of the market during the quarter, Synergy said.
“Minimum Viable Business”
Google’s latest incident has inevitably fuelled fresh concerns that UK business are too reliant on a small gaggle of US tech firms.
The outage “shows how much of the UK’s daily life now runs on a small number of cloud platforms”, Tim Pfaelzer, Senior VP EMEA at Veeam claimed.
The question for UK businesses has now moved beyond just asking, ‘can we recover our systems’, he claimed.
“[The question now] is, ‘Can we keep running the business while they’re unavailable?’,” he said.
“That means defining a ‘Minimum Viable Business’, the essential processes, systems and data that must continue during an outage, and understanding which suppliers it depends on. Relying on one region or one provider is a risk to plan for, not assume away.”
Justin Sharrocks, General Manager – EMEA at Microsoft CSP TrustedTech, advised IT leaders to interrogate whether their most critical workloads have the right resilience and recovery plans behind them, and whether those plans have actually been tested before an incident occurs.
“Yesterday’s disruption shows how quickly a cloud outage can affect the services businesses and their customers rely on,” he said.
“Resilience should be based on business impact. Organisations need to understand which services are genuinely critical, what level of protection and recovery they require, and who is responsible for responding when something goes wrong.
“Regularly reviewing cloud environments, recovery arrangements and support processes can help ensure businesses are prepared when disruption happens, while avoiding unnecessary cost and complexity.”
