What Do Cloud Failures Mean for Your Online Marketing?

Last week, one of Amazon’s cloud services in Virginia, USA, notably failed for hours, bringing down some of the world’s top websites. The EC2 data centre hosts many very well-known websites, including a number of social networking websites. Evite, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare, among others, found themselves down while Amazon worked hard to fix the problem. If your marketing plans involved launching a campaign on Foursquare, undoubtedly you had some waiting to do before they went forward, which can be disastrous in a well-planned campaign set to go off with a big push.

Herein is one of the problems with relying on so many other people for our data and actual methods of working. Already, our websites are hosted in places we can’t control, our marketing activities take place on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Foursquare, and work simply cannot happen without access to the internet. How many of our readers out there would struggle to get any work done without email? Even jobs that have nothing to do with the internet are often reliant on it for basic communication – you can just pick up the phone, of course, but it’s simply not as easy. It’s the same in your house, though, if you think about it; we’re all crippled if the power goes out or if the water stops running. We don’t generate these things ourselves, we pay others to ensure that we receive them.

The cloud is simply not any different from the services we rely on. As the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket, and neither should you rely on any one service for your online marketing. I would never advocate that you abandon your website for a Facebook page, for example, no matter who says the trend is going in that direction. Have multiple methods of marketing and try new things; that way, if one ever does fail, you’ll have plenty in other areas to keep you busy while it gets back up and running.

For the general cloud industry, however, Amazon’s downtime is very worrying. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone, and in an industry that asks small to medium size businesses to rely on them for everything, Amazon’s failure is a catastrophe. This failure has certainly damaged their credibility in the cloud field and undoubtedly caused doubt in the minds of many who had previously relied on the cloud with no worries. Amazon, however, have their eggs in many different baskets, and can afford to take the hit. If all of your systems go down, can you?