Authors: Bruce Guptill, Charlie Burns

Apple’s Siri outage highlights increasing reliance on Cloud for even the most simple tasks, such as getting directions or finding a telephone number.  It’s a terrific example of how the simplicity of a natural user interface can mask the tremendous complexities required to enable and accomplish that simplicity. It’s also a terrific example of continuing, increasing Business user expectations of Cloud use, and a complacency toward Cloud resiliency.

It’s almost paradoxical: Cloud service outages such as those experienced by users of Siri, RIM, and AWS highlight the challenges inherent in relying on Cloud IT for business, but they also fail to slow most business users (and consumers) from migrating more and more of their data, applications, and operations (and lives) into Cloud-based IT.

Saugatuck sees this as an acceptance of, and even an increasing expectation of, occasional failure. That approach may work adequately for most individual users, but cannot be acceptable for business applications and operations management.

Unfortunately, most Cloud providers are architecting their systems in ways that satisfy the “adequate” expectations of individual users, while trying to woo enterprise and SMB IT organizations into placing ever-more-critical capabilities and operations into Cloud-based services. Until these approaches change, we are likely to see more, and likely more significant, Cloud service outages based on server failure, resulting in a slowing down of enterprise-level business application and management migration to the Cloud. 

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