How to protect your data pipeline against the next cloud outage

Businesses are increasingly relying on cloud infrastructure, with cloud services projected to process 94% of workloads, due to their flexibility, speed, agility, and cost-effectiveness. However, major providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are not immune to outages, which can lead to significant data downtime costs, estimated at $5,600 per minute by Gartner. Notable outages in 2020 included a six-hour Azure outage due to overheating, a 14-hour AWS outage caused by server issues, and a Google Cloud outage impacting identity management. These incidents highlight the unpredictability and costliness of cloud outages, which can affect data quality, application availability, brand reputation, and revenue. To mitigate risks, businesses can adopt strategies such as multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-region architectures to ensure data redundancy and availability. Snowplow has developed an Outage Protection solution to minimize data loss during outages by rerouting traffic to backup regions, demonstrating the importance of proactive measures in safeguarding against data disruptions.