Companies have spent jointly $61 billion in cloud infrastructure in Q4 2022, with more growth to come. Yet businesses are poorly protected against losses due to cloud downtime.
“Cloud service providers typically offer service level agreements (SLAs) that outline their commitments to service availability and performance,” AV8 general partner Amir Kabir told businesskinda.com+. But while there are usually sanctions associated with it if agreed service levels are not metrarely cover the full losses a cloud outage could cause its customers.
Example: After millions of websites went offline afterwards a major data center fire in France, a small online seller complained to the press that her cloud provider, OVHcloud, only offered her a voucher worth a few months of free hosting – about $30, when she estimated the actual damage at $2,000.
For e-commerce companies large and small, it’s easy to see how cloud downtime can lead to lost revenue. But cloud outages can negatively impact the revenues of all kinds of businesses, whether through lost productivity or because they have their own SLAs with customers to whom they may owe compensation.
The usual consequence of risk is insurance against it, but when it comes to cloud downtime, the insurance industry has yet to fully catch up.
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