Because of the problems encountered by its hosting provider, Microsoft Azure, CloudStore the government’s latest launched catalogue of approved cloud services and providers for public sector organizations was offline. Throughout the time that the customers in Europe and the United States were affected, told by the spokesperson for Microsoft.
He added that by February 28, 2012 at around 5:45 PM, Microsoft turned out to be aware with regards to the issue striking Windows Azure service management in a number of regions. Windows Azure engineering groups worked out, approved and set up a fix that settled the issue for most of their customers, some customers in three sub-regions in South Central and North Europe and North Central US are still affected.
Microsoft said that there are continuing concerns of some customers, as services for the most of the affected customers were finally replaced. The corporate vice president server and cloud of Microsoft, Bill Laing set the issue down to a software error in identifying the leap year. He wrote on the Microsoft blog that the issue was easily sorted and it was verified to be caused by a software bug, the issue shows to be due to a time calculation that was inaccurate for the leap year, as the final root cause analysis is still ongoing.
Laing’s team is still trying to fix the issue however he could not give the exact resolution time. He added that some sub-regions and customers are still facing issues and as a result of that they may be encountering a loss of application functionality, however, they are working to address the remaining concerns. This is not the first time that the cloud encountered these kind of interruption.
In August last year because of lightning storms, Microsoft’s BPOS online desktop application suite and Amazon’s EC2 cloud service both experienced outages that lasted several days. Such interruptions make a case over a pure cloud strategy, told by the CEO of cloud storage provider Egnyte, Vineet Jain. He advised a hybrid cloud on-premise architecture for flexibility instead.
He added that downtime can be extremely relieved if organizations were to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. Firms are making an insurance policy just for these situations, by keeping a behind the firewall presence and syncing that to the public cloud. Meanwhile, they can keep interruption to a minimum and guarantee their staff is as creative as possible through the emergency situation like what they have experienced. The effective way to a productive workforce for today’s enterprise is the hybrid cloud.
REFERENCES:
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2156356/azure-outage-knocks-governments-cloudstore-offline
http://cloud.governmentcomputing.com/news/2012/feb/29/cloudstore-gcloud-microsoft-azure-outage
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/public-cloud/2951/azure-power-outage-leads-cloudstore-going-line
http://www.crowsnest.tv/link/www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2156356/azure-outage-knocks-governments-cloudstore-offline
http://www.zdnet.com/g-cloud-cloudstore-knocked-offline-by-azure-outage-4010025531/