Heath Brownsworth

Michael Krigsman’s CIO analysis: Examining Amazon’s cloud failure provides a balanced perspective on the recent Amazon outage. He focuses on five main points:

1. The sky did not fall and the cloud is here to stay.
2. Cloud leverage can be either friend or enemy.
3. Cloud is still maturing and evolving.
4. Self-reliance and proper planning are critical.
5. Learn from success stories.

Without question, the cloud hiccuped on April 21 and plenty of alarmist tweets and posts followed. However, Krigsman has a refreshing, “take a deep breath” approach. He concludes the article with this sage advice:

“CIOs should decide where their organization fits on the cloud investment / risk curve. As in other areas of business, increasing investment in robust design can reduce operational risk, but at higher financial cost. Every CIO must evaluate his or her own organization to determine the right tradeoffs between investment, technical development, and risk.”