Amazon and Iron Mountain Troubles Shake Up Cloud Providers

The cloud was back in the forefront of the news this past week and it was not all good news. First there was the news early in the week that Iron Mountain was suspending some of its cloud storage offerings while just yesterday Amazon Web Services had its own set of troubles as a number of websites that it hosted were either offline or experiencing degraded performance. The net effect of this was other cloud providers in the business getting a bit shook up.
Cloud providers are in a tenuous position right now. They clearly want consumers and especially enterprises to believe that they are “rock solid” and “stable.” But when billion dollar plus companies like Amazon cannot seamlessly handle problems (whatever they are) or Iron Mountain almost nonchalantly cancels some of it services, it does more than shake the confidence of end users and enterprises in these cloud offerings. It has the net effect of shaking up other cloud providers in the business as it calls into question their stability and long term viability.
Part of the reason they get a bit nervous when this happens is that not all cloud providers (cloud computing, cloud storage, etc.) are created equal. Some are clearly aiming at the consumer space as they only guarantee three to four 9’s of availability while others are more clearly aiming at servicing enterprise customers with guarantees of five 9’s of availability.
So when Amazon stumbles and Iron Mountain shuts down certain cloud services, it sends a ripple through the entire industry for a few reasons. First, it is not always clear which providers service which segments of the market (consumer or enterprise.) Second, it is not clear how committed specific vendors are to building out a cloud storage offering. Third and last, even those that are committed to the enterprise may not provide the level of services that enterprises may subconsciously expect.
Case in point, just last week I spoke to a representative from Blackridge Technology which offers perimeter security software. On the surface, that sounds pretty dull until one understands the impact that this technology potentially has for public cloud providers and how it can help them better ensure the delivery of their services to their clients.
Blackridge explained that one of the problems with using the web for any type of cloud services is that any time any computer touches and queries your website, your website (or whatever cloud-based service that is being offered) responds by providing a fair amount of detail about itself. This response may include the website’s IP address, the type of website software it uses and a fair amount of other information.
This may seem harmless enough but the point that Blackridge makes is why provide any of this information to the inquirer at all until you have established the nature of the inquiry? Further, depending on where the inquiry is coming from and who it is, you may not want to provide any information at all until you establish the nature of inquirer’s intent.
Granted, perimeter software already exists in some forms but what I believe makes Blackridge’s product unique is that it can be used by cloud providers such that it can be placed in front of Internet facing web servers, determine the nature of the inbound traffic and prioritize it. Now exactly how Blackridge does all of this and what is its secret sauce we did not have enough time to get into or discuss and, for all I know, it may be vaporware though it does list its Transport Access Control (TAC) product on its website.
The point I am trying to make is that it is unclear how good a job any public cloud provider currently does in classifying and prioritizing incoming traffic to its website or that is trying to access its services. Even private cloud providers are not immune from these issues as they may also have to spend time responding to unwanted or even hostile requests from internal clients that can slow or even disrupt services for applications and/or data that they offer up.
The cloud in whatever form it takes (cloud computing, cloud storage, etc.) is clearly the wave of the future. But the troubles that Amazon and Iron Mountain have experienced should not be summarily dismissed (and, as of the writing of this blog entry, the causes of Amazon’s woes were still not known or disclosed.)
Legitimate concerns about hosting applications and storing data in the cloud remain. So until cloud providers do a better job of differentiating theirs services between consumer and enterprise, demonstrate their commitment to the cloud and provide better options to authenticate and prioritize incoming traffic to their website, I would expect we have not seen the last of announcements such as we have seen in the last two weeks.

This blog entry was updated on 4/22 at 12:30 pm.