With Sony security breach and Amazon outage, past couple of days showed us exactly how fragile tech ecosystem is. While Sony is
bracing itself for dealing lawsuits and enquiries, Amazon is trying to make up for its data center outage in its own way. Amazon has also come clean about the causes of outage. Apparently, it all started when a configuration change in one of its data centers in Northern Virginia was carried out incorrectly. The configuration change was a routine procedure, but it decided to go kaput and cut off primary and secondary network. The change was being done for increasing the capacity of the network.
In order to placate its customers, the company has offered credits worth 10 days of service. While most of the customers expressed their satisfaction with the communication provided by the company, they are not so happy with the compensation. Amazon certainly performed better on this front than Sony did. Sony has been widely criticized for not communicating with its users in a prompt manner. The company corresponded too late after the security breach and did not even provide enough details.
Amazon outage, which started on April 21, affected many prominent startup companies like Reddit and FourSquare. The problems have now been fixed, but it has put a big question mark on the future of Cloud storage, which is fast becoming a hot trend. While, cloud storage is here to stay, as more and more tech companies are entering the fray, the incident will make the users learn a few lessons. One of them would be to use cloud storage as one of the various resource, this rule is of course the rehashing of age-old golden rule of not putting all your eggs in one basket. The strategy worked for the companies like SmugMug, which managed to emerge from the fiasco relatively unscathed. There is a lesson for individuals as we too are fast moving towards remote storage.