Pinoy IT firm: Amazon crash provides lessons

The recent breakdown of Amazon’s cloud services may have tarnished cloud computing and exposed its vulnerability, but a newly launched Filipino-owned cloud provider said lessons – not fear – should emerge out of the incident. ArcusIT, which debuted this April as a local provider of cloud or Internet-based business solutions, said the high-profile crash of Amazon’s cloud services only emphasized the need for proper design and redundancy in cloud-delivered applications. “Although the cloud would seem like an infinite resource, it is not infallible. Proper application design would mandate that single points of failure should be avoided. The cloud actually makes this easy," the company said in a press statement. Amazon, the US tech firm more known for its online retail business, hogged headlines in the IT world a couple of days ago when its cloud computing service broke down, crippling the sites of its customers such as Foursquare, the location-based social networking service. ArcusIT, which is based in Ortigas complex in Pasig City, said the mishap could have been avoided if the affected customers used multiple cloud providers for their applications and designed their application with the assumption that failure is inevitable. During its formal unveiling last April 14, ArcusIT said it entered the cloud computing space because most cloud computing providers, if not all, are foreign-based. “Accessing the cloud services from an offshore provider increases the cost and eats a lot of bandwidth," said ArcusIT chief technology officer Jojo Colina. “And as we all know, the telcos are starting to implement the bandwidth cap. This will make it harder to utilize the cloud hosted abroad," he said. Colina said this is where the advantages of ArcusIT come in, with the company operating hosting its services in a local data center. However, he said the company also has data center in California which caters to its local firms with mostly US clients. — Newsbytes.ph