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In my very first exposure to IT in early 1980’s, I experienced a small part of a large engineering company where raw data was keyed in by a team of female admin and submitted to a mainframe down in Stafford. If you were lucky you got a result four hours or longer later, if it wasn’t an ‘Abend’ (An abnormal end error message – technical but correctly spelt) probably due to strange data, or a comms issue down the very expensive leased line. If the mainframe was off-line or busy, your ‘job’ could not be submitted up the line sometimes for hours, maybe days.
Moving on in the late 80’s, t'internet was being imagined as a distributed network by Paul Baran and others, who originally worked to create a communication system that could withstand a nuclear attack by having no central point of control. This vision was a response to Cold War concerns about vulnerable, centralised phone lines and led to the development of ARPANET. The concept was a decentralised network designed to remain functional even if parts of it were destroyed. So far, so good.
Since the 2000’s as we know, we have seen the growth of most of our internet resources in far fewer hands. No more so than in the provision of Cloud storage and technology. This is now dominated by Amazon (AWS) approximately 30-32%, Microsoft Azure 20-23% and Google Cloud with around 11-13%. The dangers of concentration of so many eggs in so few baskets was brought home last week, as a AWS outage. We were told this was due to “a latent defect within the service’s automated DNS (domain name system) management system”. This was apparently down to an empty DNS record for the Virginia-based US-East-1 datacentre region. Well it certainly was a problem that affected many well beyond the US East Coast between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains.
Around 2,000 organisations were affected including Banking sites (Lloyds/Halifax), HMRC, parts of the NHS (at least ten sites), DWP, Ring doorbells, Duolingo and Strava. “The Cloud” in this situation feels less good than my old friend the IBM mainframe situated in Stafford in the 1980’s. Its just a big computer in someone’s big shed ! Many organisations rely indirectly on AWS. This occurs through our partners, third-party services, or SaaS applications. How aware of this are we within our supply chain? Do we even ask about it in sufficient depth?
AWS storage and Agentic AI has been enthusiastically marketed within the socialhousing sector, non-profits and among other parts of the UK public sector. AWS is in use at quite a few HA’s, such as Aches Housing in Sheffield and Housing Plus Group, in Shropshire.
One Social Housing Management System, is also currently being marketed, which operates behind AWS AppStream 2.0 as a means of browser delivery of a legacy solution. Users and residents of that one had an outage last week until around 10am on Monday, although could have been worse. Unless an ITT tender purchaser of a HMS had their wits about them, it could be easily sold as a modern browser solution, with the true platform being spotted much later. Always ask the right questions in procurement's, or have a Critical Friend along to help you do that and interpret the answers properly too!
While ‘lightning might not soon strike twice’, this shines a spotlight on the fragility of our supposedly smart technology. Amazon's massive AWS outage here, points to a key weakness in the modern internet. I have read multiple articles and listened to a tech podcast that basically took the view that ‘errors are understandable and inevitable for so-called “hyperscalers” ‘. It shows just how difficult it is, to prevent every single failure,
While no one I know really would like to return to multiple rooms of refrigerated tin, what is to be done going forward? What appetite might there be for the big three to work together to enable redundancy? Are organisations better looking for smaller alternatives or spreading their risk (with the downside of potential duplication and additional expense).
The questions for management and their boards following this should include, “do we have good enough dependency mapping” also “have we effective business continuity planning” ? Does the potential fragility of our core storage choices make our organisation fragile too. In previous blogs I have shone a light on the tech beneath, another latent issue.
Boards should consider specific due diligence regarding reliance on automated systems managed by the hyperscalers. If a latent defect in an automated process can bring down critical infrastructure affecting major banks, government services (HMRC, NHS, DWP), and consumer services, the question must be asked: What is the specific risk quantification tied to single points of failure within provider automation layers?
Fingers crossed, the next major Cloud outage may spare you !
Related Post: If we implement new browser based solutions, do we still need mobile apps?
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me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this
blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.
Wire – Fragile
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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