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March 5, 2012Leap Day Glitch Causes Windows Azure Cloud Downtime in US, Europe
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A glitch with a security certificate on the Windows Azure cloud platform caused an outage that lasted more than 12 hours on Tuesday, according to several reports Wednesday. Many have speculated that the issue was date-related since Feb. 29 is Leap Day which happens only once every four years.
According to a statement by Microsoft posted on Data Center Knowledge, the issue was detected on Feb.28 at 5:45 PM PST and Windows Azure deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of its customers, although customers in a number of regions including North Central US, South Central US and North Europe were offline for longer.
The outage illustrates that cloud providers need to update security certificates to prevent a similar issue from happening. Web hosts that offer cloud services may have to prepare for questions from customers concerned about security and reliability of cloud after this outage, though possibly be able to inform customers about data backup and cloud storage in multiple data centers or hybrid clouds as a preventative measure for data loss.
“The outage that occurred today with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform can be crippling and cost millions if not billions of dollars, but more importantly highlights the down side of a pure cloud strategy in the enterprise,” Vineet Jain, CEO of cloud storage provider Egnyte said in a statement sent to the WHIR via email. “While we certainly don’t relish these moments, the downtime can be significantly mitigated if organizations were to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. By maintaining a behind the firewall presence and syncing that to the public cloud, companies are creating an insurance policy just for these situations. At the same time they can keep downtime to a minimum and insure their employees are as productive as possible in an emergency situation like this.”
While there is some discussion on Twitter about how big Azure’s customer base really is, and which sites were affected by the outage, downtime definitely hit the recently launched G-Cloud store in the UK, an online storefront for UK public sector organizations to purchase cloud computing services. G-Cloud reported the outage via Twitter at 7:11 AM and by 11:37 AM it was back up and running.
This outage comes a few days after cloud services provider CA Technologies began offering the CA ARCserve D2D on Demand, a hybrid SaaS data protection and disaster recovery solution combining local backup speed with Windows Azure cloud storage.
by Nicole Henderson via thewhir.com