Why AWS wasn’t the real point of failure

March 2017

So, Amazon Web Services went AWOL this week, leaving many websites inoperable.

In the currently climate of fake and inaccurate news, it is important to read beyond the headline to realise that “AWS” did not go down; rather one service in one region went down. Namely S3 on AWS US East Region.

If your “cloud” solution had a single point of failure (S3 on AWS US East Region) then guess what, if that single point fails, then your solution fails. And many did.

Industry has known and architected traditional business solutions for decades now; it has known about single points of failures; it has read the many case studies of successful business continuity solutions of how good architectures have saved the day when services fail.

So, why because “it’s the cloud” should anything be different?

Surely a good cloud architecture would eliminate single points of failure?

We’ve seen the news of the services running on AWS that failed. I hope in time we get the case studies of the services running on AWS that successfully survived the outage with good solution architectures!

AWS didn’t fail – the real failure for these organisations is having a single point of failure.

Learn more about Nexor’s approach to cloud security.

Author Bio – Colin Robbins

Colin Robbins is Nexor’s Managing Security Consultant. He is a Fellow of the IISP, and a NCSC certified Security and Information Risk Adviser (Lead CCP) and Security Auditor (Senior CCP). He has specific technical experience in Secure Information Exchange & Identity Systems and is credited as the co-inventor of LDAP. He also has a strong interest in security governance, being a qualified ISO 27001 auditor.

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