What Happens When the Cloud Goes Down & Prevent Cloud Outage

No matter how popular, how small, or how big cloud services you are using, every cloud solution has downtime. But, yes, there is a huge difference between the planned downtime and unplanned downtime (also called as an outage).Know what happens if the cloud servers go down or during cloud outage !

In recent years, cloud computing no doubt is the greatest advancement in IT. Irrespective of the fears and uncertainties that most of the organizations experience before switching to the cloud, the benefits that one can have after moving are simply too large to ignore. However, this cloud computing allows organizations of all sizes in the market to fasten up their implementation times, to become more intelligent, optimize the infrastructure costs.

In the cloud, a user does not own anything in actual. They are simply renting the resources that users are using and for how long they want to use them. It hardly matters whether the resources are virtual machines, databases, storage space, or a tool. They are only available for the time users are paying them or they stay in business.

Planned Downtime

The planned downtime is the part of standard terms for all cloud providers. It is time when the providers perform some maintenance on the cloud. Always keep in mind that cloud is a cluster of several hardware and software in the data centers, which requires constant caring and feeding. Most of the time, this maintenance is done in the backend without actually affecting the uptime and cloud accessibility. But in some cases, system maintenance requires a small outage to complete the process successfully. Moreover, this planned cloud outage is done for few hours only in the middle of the night. Hence, it will not affect that much to the users.

Crashes Happen

What if the cloud goes down I.e, unplanned downtime that happens suddenly at any time of the day without any warning and creates more trouble. However, no organization is free from unplanned cloud outage. All big organizations like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc., have many unplanned outages. After spending millions of hours and dollars spent to prevent cloud outages, the environment is really complex to overcome them entirely. It is because there is n number of layers that change daily with the components and completely out of control of cloud providers.

Problem from User’s Side

Sometimes a business in multiple locations using the same cloud. In this case, if a single office is down, then it is not because of an actual cloud provider. It can be possible that there is a power cut in that office, the internet service is discontinued, or components in the office such as firewall might have failed. Any of this situation can lead that particular situation down. In such cases, users are suggested to move to their home internet and access the cloud.

Whenever the cloud servers go down in the area of the country or world, or down entirely, the vendors work hard to get the service back to online. Moreover, they also try to find out the root cause in order to prevent it from occurring again.

What  Happens When the Cloud Goes Down : Know What to Do?

Whenever a user experience downtime while using a cloud, there are some steps that you need to performed to identify what happens if the cloud servers go down

• Is a user able to access the internet and other websites from his or her location? If yes, then it is not a problem with the Internet service, the cloud service might be down. If no, then the cloud service is running properly and the problem is in the location, which is down.
• Find out what happens when the cloud goes down? Whether the cloud service is down in actual or just slow. In most the cases, the cloud service is not down in real but running slowly. It is really important to know before going to next step.
• Now, you need to contact the cloud providers by phone or email and ask them if they are having any problem related to their service. In addition, give them all details about the problem such as whether the cloud servers go down or just slow.
• Ask them the estimated time in which the service will be back. Most of the time, they are not able to answer this question and calling again and again will divert them from overcoming the issue. Have patience as they are doing there best to get service back to online.
• As the cloud service is back to online, simply ask the providers the reason behind this cloud outage . It is always good to ask.
• Now, check the Service Level Agreement that a user has with the cloud provider. Most of the times, they guarantee approx level of uptime, like 99.999%. however, if the cloud servers go down for longer than the commitment, then they might owe a refund for that time.
• At last, if these cloud outage continue over time, then a user must start looking for some another provider.

Every cloud service goes down sometimes. This is very annoying and has a negative impact on the business so, the cloud outage are expected, but not on regular basis. However, there is no machine whether they owned by themselves or in the cloud is free from downtime. Through this blog you can explore what happens if the cloud servers go down. Thus, the only solution always has a cloud provider, which address all issues quickly, communicates frequently and always has ready access to the support.