6 steps to survive a cloud outage

Find out what's happening in the cloud when things go sideways. Cloud providers have traditionally been opaque about service disruptions and outages, but this is changing as businesses entrust more valuable workloads to the public cloud. Businesses demand more cloud transparency, and providers are improving their communication with users, offering more timely insights about the nature of an outage and its current status.

For example, AWS provides a Service Health Dashboard that offers the current status of all services, while Azure provides a similar Azure Status page. DR decision-making can hinge upon your understanding of the disaster and its severity, the provider's estimates about its duration -- all of which can improve with greater cloud transparency.

But don't stop there. The business and user base depends on the affected workloads, so it's equally important to communicate details of the outage to internal users or customers. Inform them about the outage, its effect on the workloads and the steps being taken to resolve it.