How Your Cloud Solution May Be at Risk: Five Causes of Failure and How to Prevent Them

In this data-driven age, it's no secret that our businesses are dependent on systems to be productive.  We feel paralyzed when we don't have access to them, yet keeping up with the risks associated with system failure is certainly a challenge. We are forced to ask: just how important are our mission-critical applications? How will it affect me or my business if they go down? And what is the dollar amount associated with that outage?

Let's Do the Math

I recently had this conversation with a law firm.  The customer explained that they have simple business processes and don't need a lot of complicated technology - that they merely create and process documents.  I inquired what their hourly rate is for attorneys, to which they proudly replied $500 per hour.  For simplicity's sake, we'll round the number of attorneys on staff to 50.  That's $25,000 of lost revenue per hour of outage. We then discussed how they wouldn't be able to function if the file store that houses all of their templates went away. They would be losing $25,000 each and every hour, not to mention the lost billings from support personnel and the impact to their brand.  For this firm, a small investment in a highly-available cloud solution has a strong business case.

Many people believe that moving their applications to the cloud solves these problems.  For commodity applications like email, it does.  But traditional client-server applications like Microsoft Dynamics aren't automatically safeguarded from outage just because they are installed on a cloud server.  Let's look at the most common causes of system failure, and what we can do to further lower risk.

Five Ways to Lower the Risk of System Failure

First, let's define what makes up these applications.  This applies ...