We are witnessing major cloud service providers flexing their muscles giving us all cause for concern; NonStop in the data center becoming a viable alternative for many enterprises.
We have just come through our twelfth snowstorm here in
Northern Colorado. It is pretty normal to see that many snowfalls by the time
spring arrives. However, this particular snowstorm broke a number of records
and it has taken me many days to clear a path to our front door, but as the
weekend approached the skies have cleared and there is very few clouds to be
seen. What occurs in nature however is no indication of what happens in the
world of business where there are many more clouds to be seen than what was
present overhead that day.
There is no escaping how many references to cloud
computing you will come across of late. The mega-vendors who are the big
purveyors of cloud computing are battling it out over market share and all the
time, the questions keep coming up. Can I afford not to move to the cloud? Can
I be assured that my data is safe? Can I enjoy the cloud experience all on my
own using my own systems?
However, this year we have witnessed an escalation in something
quite different and it comes in two forms. Clouds that burn down and well, clouds
that throw you off; reminds us all of those lines in a song from the 1960s:
Don't
hang around 'cause two's a crowd
On my cloud
Hey
(hey), you (you)
Get off of my cloud
Apparently, not every business is inclined to pursue
deploying such an infrastructure and just this month, many businesses were
simply burnt for their lack of insight. Perhaps burnt is the correct word as in
France, a cloud services firm caught on fire! According to the March 10, 2021,
report from Reuters, Millions
of websites offline after fire at French cloud services firm
this fire at OVHcloud “disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government
agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the
.FR web space, according to internet monitors.”
Apparently, it was just before midnight at OVHcloud
when the fire broke out and it “destroyed one of four data centers in
Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said.”
Disruptive as the fire obviously was to the French community it did surprise
some members of the NonStop community. One NonStop vendor went so far as to
suggest they dodged a bullet in that, “We used OVH for some cloud and web
services up until about two years ago. It is scary to realize that we
could have been knocked out for a bit.”
Let’s consider the fire as being something we could
classify as a natural disaster and for the majority of NonStop users, adequate
measures have been taken to mitigate disruptions to transaction processing that
usually involve the deployment of secondary sites that will activate instantly,
no matter what takes place. However, what we have witnessed in 2021 is totally
unnatural; cloud services firms are taking unilateral actions to throw businesses
off of their cloud.
These unilateral actions
were highlighted in a recent Gartner report referenced in the article Gartner -
Three tips to avoid cloud service suspension - that appeared in one of the oldest publications (now
digital) in the world, Computer Weekly. The opening lines of this article tell
the whole story as reporter Lydia Leong states, “As recent events have shown,
public cloud providers have the power to terminate cloud contracts, and
seemingly legitimate businesses may be at risk. Amazon Web Services, Okta and
Stripe suspended or terminated service to Parler after the organized mob invasion of the US Capitol
building in January. Not only did this effectively result in Parler’s business
being shut down, but it was also a public demonstration of the willingness of
technology service providers to ‘deplatform’ undesirable customers.”
This comes after similar
actions were taken by Technology service providers (TSPs) that have rejected,
terminated or announced they would no longer support contracts with certain
companies before. “For example, Mastercard, Visa and PayPal terminated services to
Pornhub, a YouTube-like site for
adult videos, in December 2020, and Salesforce changed the language in its
terms of service in 2019 to deny services to gun retailers.” Irrespective of
whether or not you find these sites
distasteful or simply yet more instances of exploitation of the unwary going
global, censorship has a tendency to grow unchecked such that, in time, parties
become embolden to take down anything and everything that they may disagree
with – next, it could be your business!
Now I am not
suggesting for one moment that any members of the NonStop community are
embracing practices that might incur the wrath of the mighty cloud service
providers and yet, with no real rules being publicly addressed (and
promoted), it should send a strong signal to us all that perhaps our most
mission critical transaction processing applications together with the data
that they create doesn’t belong on public clouds. As one NonStop executive
noted, there are still those enterprises that “have definitely not thought
about the unavailability of a cloud infrastructure should the cloud provider takes
a dislike to them and kick them off their cloud without warning.”
The risk that a cloud provider would de-platform a
customer’s infrastructure, without warning, has now become a real possibility.
On a whim, perhaps, and maybe following a warning note but imagine having your
call center or your order entry system suspended simply because a cloud service
provider had AI scanning your content and coming up with a sequence of words
that the cloud service provider had flagged as unworthy of further support.
“Get off my cloud,” said another reporter may have been an appeal for “unauthorized
hackers to stay away from confidential and proprietary information stored in a
very publicly accessible place” but now it’s cutting much deeper. Not hackers
but businesses – who could have imagined we would come to this?
When HPE is actively promoting the cloud as not being a
destination but an experience and lobbying enterprises to take a serious look
at GreenLake to better build out their own, mostly on-prem private clouds,
perhaps they were being prescient. Did they know in advance that something was
afoot? Did they suspect that big public cloud providers would soon wield the
power to choose who to support and who not to support? Probably not, but it’s
hard to ignore their approach to clouds and there is mounting evidence that
NonStop has become part of their GreenLake offerings.
However, perhaps the strongest message that has come
from these recent headlines is that the cloud is no panacea. It’s not a one
size fits all or one approach satisfies every business. Enterprises are
ultimately responsible for their actions, their destiny and their employees and
customers. Isn’t it wise then to look at NonStop systems and the cloud
experiences that are coming to market that feature NonStop? To the seasoned IT
professional there has been a sense of reticence to be all-in on clouds and now
we know that any misgivings they may have had were clearly quite warranted.
All we need to know now is not which cloud service
provider to choose or even which financial model makes the most sense – CapEx
vs OpEx – but rather, how about longevity? How about stability? And yes, most
important of all perhaps, how about staying in business. We may all know the
words to the song Hey, you, get off of my
cloud!, but did we ever think that it would become the rallying call of
enterprises prepared to disrupt our business? Fires and other natural disasters
we should all be prepared to handle. Isn’t it about time then that we give more
than a cursory look at what is perhaps the very worst of manmade disasters –
parties that for whatever reason just don’t like us and send us packing?
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