What Microsoft Dynamics Customers and Vendors Can Learn from Cloud Outages: Plan, Evaluate, and Prepare

The recent outage of Amazon's EC2 and RDS services raised questions about how reliable cloud services actually are as well as about what providers and customers can do to mitigate the risks of such outages.

The one thing that should be painfully obvious from the EC2 outage is that nothing is flawless. And we haven't seen the last of outages in cloud computing.

"Cloud infrastructure is no different than any other infrastructure but there's this expectation of immortality [with the cloud]," said Niels Skjoldager, partner at ProISV, a small Danish software company that has developed a solution called AX Cloud that makes it possible for customers to run Microsoft Dynamics AX on Amazon's EC2 cloud. "However, behind the scenes, behind the fluff we have servers and we have infrastructure and we have people running all that stuff. And nothing is flawless."

Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, agrees that downtime isn't unique to the cloud.

"What we've seen with ERP is that it's important as a customer to know what your vendor's plan is so your vendor should be SAS 70 compliant to ensure they have back up and disaster recovery in place," she said. "And in the case of an outage they have to a clear plan that they communicate to customers." Being SAS 70 compliant means providers must demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards when they host or process data belonging to their customers.

"Vendors should have service level agreements in the contract for active operations and disaster recovery," Wettemann added. "We're seeing smaller ERP vendors put those promises directly in the contract ...