Amazon AWS Outage Shows Data in the Cloud is Not Always Safe

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a major player in the cloud computing world. AWS provides amazing technological services, like database, storage, applications, analytics, as well as deployment services.

There are thousands of small and large companies relying on AWS for their cloud-computing needs. This is because they have found the growth along with the best economical deal. It is also time-saving, cost-effective, and extremely scalable service for all sorts of online businesses.

What about the Major AWS Outage?

At the beginning of this year, S3, a major component of AWS stopped working for various people around the world. This outage lasted for around five hours and many websites remained down for this entire time duration. It resulted in the loss of profit along with the loss of technological services.

According to many cloud analysts, it was a pretty big outage. This is because the S3 system has been used for many years by more than 150,000 sites, as per the market research. But such big AWS outage can affect the normal functioning of various websites, including, Medium, Expedia, and Health Commission. That’s why many general services were impacted around the world.

Here’s What Caused It

According to the associates of Amazon, this outage was the result of a ‘human error’ when certain employees were fixing some billing issues in their system. They mentioned in a post that an authorized member of their S3 team was using a developed playbook while executing a command that was supposed to eliminate small servers from one of their S3 subsystems during the S3 billing process. But unfortunately, one of these inputs were entered incorrectly into the system. This led to the removal of larger servers than they actually intended.

Due to this error, Amazon had to check and restart all the services and systems again and it tools several hours to do so. Even the S3 system was not rebooted in so many years, and it had grown exponentially since its last reboot. This also leads to more delay during the restoration process.

Later, Amazon executives apologized for their service error. But also mentioned that they are still proud of their long track record for easy navigation and availability with the S3 system.

But this certainly led to certain concerns over the cloud computing services. If such a popular company faced a major outage due to a small error, are small organizations secure in the industry?

Is Cloud Safe for Your Organization?

The AWS outage has caused major concerns with your cloud data. The major risk is to hand over all the precious data to any other company for storage. You might be feeling hesitant to trust cloud storage due to fear of loss.

This was AWS’s major outage in within the two years. But still, the data interruption has not to lead to any permanent data loss.

The other major concern is the cloud data security.

So how AWS keeps your data secure?

The most common way to keep your digital data safe is through encryption, both during the data is in transit and when the data is “at rest” on the cloud computing servers.

AWS is one of the major cloud platform providers in the world – with over millions of active customers worldwide. For security, the customers can even choose their encryption key as they desire and all this will set rules for those who can and cannot access your data applications.

Conclusion

The cloud is still developing and online businesses must realize that they cannot put all their “eggs” in just one basket – matter what’s your sales pitch or market share in the industry. We have seen what a small human error can lead you to, no matter how many security measures you take. However, you can try preventing your data by opting encryption for achieving 99.9% resiliency.