Cloud Outages Cost You Big: Here’s How to Stay Online No Matter What

When IT goes down, the hit is immediate: revenue walks out the door, employees grind to a halt, and customers start questioning your credibility. Cloud services are built to prevent that spiral, with redundancy, automatic failover, and cross region replication baked right in. Try matching that with your own data center and you are signing up for massive hardware bills, nonstop maintenance, and the joy of keeping everything powered and patched around the clock. Cloud resilience is not just better. It is on a completely different level.

The High Stakes of Downtime

Your business depends on fast, reliable access to data: whether you’re running an eCommerce platform, financial services firm, or healthcare system. Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a financial disaster. Every minute of outage costs businesses an average of $9,000. That’s why companies demand high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions that won’t fail when they need them most. HA and DR are essential components of any organization’s business continuity plan (BCP).

Dependable access to business data is essential for operational efficiency and accurate decision-making. More organizations rely on access to high-availability data to automate business processes, and ready access to stored data and databases is critical for e-commerce, financial services, healthcare systems, CRM, inventory management, etc. The increased need for reliable data access drives more organizations to embrace cloud computing.

According to Gartner, “Seventy percent of organizations are poorly positioned in terms of disaster recovery (DR) capabilities, with 54% likely suffering from ‘mirages of overconfidence.’” To minimize the risk of costly downtime, cloud customers must shop for reliable data access services.

The Uptime Institute offers four tiers of data center classification for resiliency and redundancy.

• Tier I – The lowest uptime ranking with basic data infrastructure, limited redundancy, and the highest risk of downtime.
• Tier II – Offers additional physical infrastructure redundancy for power and cooling with downtime during maintenance.
• Tier III – Supports concurrent maintenance and provides multiple data disruption paths so components can be removed or replaced without interruption.
• Tier IV – A fault-tolerant infrastructure that guarantees uninterrupted cooling and power, with redundant systems so that no single event will create a failure.

Most on-premises data centers strive for Tier II or III designs. Most customers demand high uptime shop for Tier III and Tier IV services, and the cost and complexity of achieving a Tier IV design are usually left to cloud service providers.

To provide high availability, many cloud computing providers segment their infrastructure into Availability Zones (AZs), with each zone set up to operate independently. Each AZ has one or more data centers with self-contained power, cooling, and networking capabilities to minimize failures. AZs are typically situated close to one another to minimize latency for data replication. They also have redundant infrastructures, so there is no single point of failure within the AZ. Distributing workloads across AZs promotes high availability and alight with Tier III and Tier IV capabilities to minimize downtime.

To calculate uptime, you multiply the availability of every layer of the application infrastructure, starting with the underlying AZ, through the operating system, and then finally the application layer. In order to have the highest availability, architectures allow for applications to “fail over, patch/upgrade, and then fail back.” whether it is across AZs, or during operating system, database patching, and upgrade.

The ability to replicate data across regions is the ideal solution for disaster recovery. Regions can be separated by geographic areas or even continents, but having access to redundant data ensures that applications and workloads remain operational, even in the event of a natural disaster or widespread network failure.

Providing cross-region DR in the cloud is central to the BCP and ensures data availability, with data being asynchronously or synchronously replicated across regions. Cloud DR also includes managed failover, switching traffic to a secondary region if the primary cloud infrastructure fails.

Maintaining cross-region failovers may have some performance tradeoffs. There may be higher latency and costs compared to multi-AZ replication, but the benefits of maintaining continuous operations offset performance drawbacks.

Comparing On-premises Versus Cloud HA and DR

Deciding whether to adopt on-premises or cloud computing data centers is largely a matter of comparing costs and capabilities.

On-premises environments are ideal for users who require absolute control and customization. For example, healthcare and financial services organizations may need full control over hardware and software configurations and data because of security and unique compliance requirements. On-premises data centers also offer greater control over system performance.

Scaling on-premises data centers to support high availability and disaster recovery is expensive, requiring redundant hardware and software, generators, backup cooling capacity, etc. Maintaining a high-performance data infrastructure requires substantial expertise and maintenance, including regular failover testing.

While cloud-based data centers offer less control over configurations, they tend to provide greater reliability. The cloud service providers manage the physical infrastructure, scaling computing power and data storage as needed without installing additional hardware. Service-level agreements ensure data availability and system uptime.

Cloud data centers also offer high availability using strategies such as Availability Zones and disaster recovery using cross-region replication. Most of these services are included with cloud services contracts and are easier to set up than provisioning multiple sites on-premises. Most cloud computing providers also use a pay-as-you-go model, simplifying budgeting and cutting costs.

Many organizations adopt a hybrid strategy, using on-premises data center services for critical computing applications and leveraging cloud computing services for DR and scalability. Adopting a hybrid approach mitigates risk by replicating critical workloads to cloud-based systems, providing DR without duplicating hardware and software. Adopting a hybrid strategy also helps to cut costs for redundant services that are seldom used. It also allows companies to migrate data services to the cloud over time.

In the end, high availability and disaster recovery are not optional; they are the backbone of every modern enterprise. And while hybrid strategies can balance security, compliance, and cost, the cloud remains unmatched when it comes to delivering true resilience at scale. Its built-in redundancy, automatic failover, and cross region replication provide a level of protection that on premises systems simply cannot match without astronomical investment. For organizations that want continuity they can trust, the cloud is not just a viable option. It is the strategic choice.

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About the Author

Bakul Banthia is co-founder of Tessell. Tessell is a cloud-native Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platform that simplifies the setup, management, security, and scaling of transactional and analytic databases in the cloud.

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