Glenn Weinstein
Last week’s much-discussed Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage reignited simplistic debate about whether public cloud computing was “ready” for widespread use. The usual naysayers jumped like bullies on a perceived sign of weakness from the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, who happens to also be the leading example of the innovation made possible by this new model. Shamefully, some alleged advocates of cloud computing for the enterprise joined the fray with it’s-time-to-panic soundbites like, “if you put all of your eggs in one basket, you put yourself at risk,” in directing blame to Amazon’s customers for their own troubles.
This kind of “I told you so” finger-wagging is ill-timed, particularly with regard to the AWS incident’s implications for the enterprise, for several reasons: