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Cautionary tale of Amazon’s cloud crash

The recent crash of Amazon\'s cloud computing services has left a dark spot in the minds of some feds and contractors.

Federal News Network Staff

April 27, 2011 3:44 pm

< a min read

wfedstaff | June 4, 2015 12:01 am

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By Jolie Lee
Federal News Radio

The recent crash of Amazon’s cloud computing services is a reminder to agencies to take a “holistic approach” to the cloud.

“We need to look at the cloud as any complex managed solution and use best practices,” said Michael Fox, director of Public Sector for Carpathia.

The Amazon outage took down a number of websites, including some for federal agencies. However, Fox said, “I would not put the onus on Amazon.”

Websites that suffered did not have second sites or redundancies to help them recoup from the crash, Fox said.

“Customers affected were ones with single-point failure,” he said.

Fox said the cloud should be viewed as any other technology and agencies should treat it with the same level of security as with a server, a network or storage management.

The Amazon incident may slow down some cloud-first initiatives at agencies, but Fox said it would “behoove agencies” to move to the cloud sooner than later.

The crash, then, should be “something we should look at and learn some lessons from,” he said.