Cloud Service Outages Remain Costly

7/12/2012- Votacall Hosted VoIP & Cloud Based UC Solutions-Over the years that Cloud Services have been available there have been outages and failures by all sizes of providers. Their are large company failures such as Google and Amazon while the smallest VoIP provider you have not even heard of has failures too. Since 2007, it is reported that the the thirteen largest Cloud providers in the world have had 568 hours of outages. These outages have translated to a reported $71.7 million in costs for those companies. This number is based on a couple reports, PayPal reports an expense of $225,000 per each hour of outage, while Amadeus (travel service provider) pegs its outages at a cost of $89,000 per hour. These numbers vary on the company and regardless have a significant impact on expenses.

Customers are weary that these outages could cause the Unified Communication providers to lose their data. These outages force VoIP providers to backup their data in other storage areas in order to guarantee their customers will not lose anything. The Cloud is a new idea that has changed the communication industry and allowed for small businesses to join the trend and cut costs. The overall Customer Experience is amazing when their are no outages. But when the servers crash, customers become disgruntled and add to the expenses of the providers. Amazon gave out a 10 day free-trial to its users when their system crashed; this is an uncalculated expense because during those 10 days their revenue stream was significantly impacted and reduced. To eliminate these expenses, Cloud Communication providers need to focus on their networks and minimize failures. A small company such as Votacall (a Massachusetts VoIP provider) has an easier time of this as oppose to Google which has thousands of other issues throughout their whole company's spectrum. The Mobility that a well Managed VoIP Telecom provider gives to a customer is worth any expense or outage failure because a normal Premise-Base PBX system does not allow for that. The features and functionality of the Cloud is worth any expense a provider has to sustain in order to stay in business. But regardless, service outages remain very costly to providers.