AWS Outage Magnifies Multi-Cloud Management, Business Continuity & IoT -

For the most part, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is incredibly reliable. But today is a particularly difficult day for AWS and its public cloud customers.

Indeed, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has suffered from major outages and issues for portions of today. The problems include “high error rates" across multiple AWS S3 locations, according to the AWS Service Health Dashboard.

Affected websites and services include Quora, newsletter provider Sailthru, Business Insider, Giphy, image hosting at a number of publisher websites, filesharing in Slack, and many more, according to TechCrunch. Connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware is also being impacted, with many unable to control these devices as a result of the outage, the media site says.

AWS Outage: Got Multi-Cloud Management?

The takeaway for channel partners and MSPs: Putting all your eggs in a single cloud basket continues to involve some risks. And that's why multi-cloud management strategies, cloud-to-cloud backup and associated tools remain critically important.

Amid those market realities, the multi-cloud management market will reach $3.4 billion in 2021, up from $939.3 million in 2016, according to Markets and Markets. That’s a strong 29.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), the research says.

I'm not suggesting that MSPs can actually build completely redundant systems across multiple cloud providers. But there are some promising efforts under way to help customers balance and manage their workloads across multiple clouds. Those efforts, in theory, could reduce the pain during public cloud outages like AWS's setbacks today.

Among the companies working to fill the multi-cloud management void:

Accenture, which has been acquiring SaaS consulting companies focused on Google Apps, Workday and ServiceNow;

Cliqr, which Cisco Systems acquired;

Dell Technologies, which owns Boomi;

Rackspace, which is building out managed services for AWS and Azure; and

VMware, which is betting its business on multi-cloud management.

Again, I'm not suggesting multi-cloud management is a silver bullet solution that protects customers from specific cloud outages. But I wonder: How many channel partners know how to backup critical services from one cloud -- and restore them in another?

Hmmm...