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Interview: Business focus on downtime and cloud computing

Cloud computing has continued to grow in popularity this year, and, within this, hybrid cloud specifically has seen rapid growth as the approach of choice for businesses.

Photo: © AFP
Photo: © AFP

Google suffered a brief outage this month, recovering relatively quickly but leaving many thinking more seriously about the wide-ranging impacts downtime can have. Jon Lucas, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting, has considered the key issues of downtime, cloud computing trends, and why his business, Hyve, has remained as one of the few private cloud computing companies.

To discover more, Digital Journal spoke with Jon Lucas, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting.

Digital Journal: Following the recent Google outage, why is it so important for cloud providers not to experience downtime and how can it be avoided? 

Jon Lucas: In today’s hyperconnected world, an outage can have costly and wide-ranging consequences. The Uptime Institute’s 2021 Global Data Center Survey found that the cost of outages is on the rise – over half of respondents said they had lost over $100,000 as a result of outages, and 15 percent of those had lost more than $1 million.

As soon as an outage does occur, the focus automatically shifts onto how long it takes services to come back online. In general terms, the longer the outage lasts the more costly it becomes. And this has a big impact. In the world of ecommerce, for example, Hyve research found that 2 in 5 UK consumers wouldn’t wait more than a minute if faced with an online outage before switching to a competitor’s site. 

For companies looking to mitigate the effects of cloud outages on their business, they should start by ensuring infrastructure is fit for purpose as well as not becoming reliant on a single public cloud provider, which as we’ve seen in recent times, is still liable to go down at times.

DJ: What makes your business different?

Lucas: The hosting industry has long been known for overpriced, sub-par customer service and support. That’s why we’re entirely focused on providing exceptional service to our customers , by finding the right solution for them and essentially becoming an extension of their team. From initial consultation to migration and ongoing 24/7/365 support, our dedicated experts make sure that their cloud environment is running optimally and continuously. 

This is partly made possible because we’re one of the last remaining privately-owned cloud hosting providers, which means we’ve maintained our identity as we’ve grown organically alongside our customers. This has also meant we’ve been able to preserve and maintain the close relationships we have with our customers – who each receive support from a dedicated team that knows the needs of the business and its infrastructure inside out.

There’s no such thing as tier-based support here – such as you might get with larger public cloud providers. Every customer has direct access to our engineers who in turn view themselves as an extension of customers’ in-house teams. This customer intimacy is key to our ethos.

We also operate across both sides of the Atlantic. We have a unique view into the cloud industry and how it’s developing in both Europe and the US, and we use this unique insight to learn lessons from both regions and inform our work in each.

DJ: How have you seen cloud computing evolve this year?

Lucas: Cloud computing has continued to grow in popularity this year, and, within this, hybrid cloud specifically has seen rapid growth as the approach of choice for businesses. This is largely due to its unprecedented flexibility, allowing users to benefit from a range of public and private options. 

Hybrid cloud allows agile businesses to have complete control over data and applications, with the capability to transfer data and workloads between any number of cloud services while also increasing and decreasing capacity as required. Legacy applications can also function on servers on-premises while remaining very much an integrated part of an organisation’s overall hosted infrastructure.

We expect to see more businesses making the switch throughout this year and into the next as cloud migration continues to become more and more integral to business strategy. Coupled with the right management, it’s being widely recognised for its bespoke flexibility, affordability, scalability, and security benefits.

DJ: Is there any technology you see as playing a big role in the future of cloud computing?

Hyperconvergence is something we see playing a really exciting role in cloud computing in the coming months and years. This is a framework which combines networking, computing and storage into a single system, reducing data centre complexity and increasing scalability – a big priority for many customers. The integrated management capabilities will be invaluable to customer projects in the future.

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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