Codecraft

software = science + art + people

In the world of cloud computing, “risk” is a big buzz word. Lots of analysts are debating how much risk is involved in using SaaS offerings like Salesforce, or hosting corporate applications with a public IaaS provider like Amazon’s EC2. They’re worried about outages (Amazon’s had several ugly ones, most recently for 49 minutes in January), about security, about regulatory compliance, and so forth.

Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, NextWeb 2008: Everything fails, all the time.
Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, NextWeb 2008: "Everything fails, all the time."

These worries are well founded. However, I pointed out today on Adaptive Computing’s blog that the question “Can I take the risk to use the cloud?” is a bit naive. Sometimes you can just avoid risk altogether. In many cases, however, risk is endemic, and the smart course is to manage it.

How does risk figure in your architectural vision? You should think about it all the time. You should count it, weigh and balance alternative outcomes in ways that would impress even the gaming industry.

Here are 6 key questions to kick-start your pondering:

Action Item

Make a list of a handful of important risks from your customer's perspective. How many of them can you help with?