What are your expectations for the cloud?
It’s got to be up all the time or “I don’t care, except for during tax season’. I hear this constantly from prospective clients.
Amazon’s recent cloud outage raised concerns about uptime, and reminded me of how our expectations may be a little unrealistic when it comes to cloud tech.
For the longest time, our phones were super reliable. Landlines are directly connected and every time you made a phone call, it was clear and crisp. And then cell phones entered the picture. Cellphones gave us all the things we were looking for in a phone on the go, but there was a problem, or at least we thought it was a problem at the time.
We used to lose our minds when a cell call dropped. We would call the phone provider and yell at a helpless customer service rep. But what would happen if you dropped a call or started hearing static on your line today? You would probably say something like, Oh, you sound like you’re in a submarine, I’ll call you back, or Can you call me back? We have different expectations now.
Apply this to the cloud.
The cloud lets your business save thousands (or more) every month by getting rid of servers and large hosting fees. You can give your entire team safe and secure access to all the data they need from anywhere in the world.
Some days a cloud gets a little stormy. Some days it doesn’t. We need to temper our expectations. Shrug and go for a coffee, pick up the phone and call someone and take a little ‘me’ time.
Sure, you could sit there and hammer on the phones or chat and yell at someone, but I guarantee you they can’t do anything about it.
The cloud is extremely valuable to businesses of all sizes because it’s different than the ancient servers that used to store all our data. It’s different tech, and sometimes it might experience a little more downtime than your servers would in the past.
Have you experienced any downtime recently? Did you freak out or did you just accept it? Tell me in the comments below.