Rackspace Outage Shows Delicacy of Cloud [UPDATED]

According to sister site CNET, hosting company Rackspace experienced an outage yesterday. This is the type of incident that will have to become as uncommon as eggplants with wings before cloud computing can get the wide enterprise adoption that so many pundits and vendors insist is just around the corner.

The hype has been heavy, and many will admit that cloud computing is probably years away from general enterprise acceptance for a few key worries on the part of CIOs:

security
reliability
availability

To put it succinctly, cloud computing has to deliver the bottom-line results that corporations have been expecting for years. What complicates things is that top tech execs constantly have their jobs on the line. This is one market where the saying "any publicity is good publicity" goes out the window. One big bad public word can put off the buyers.

That's the problem that a company like Rackspace faces. Sure, it's one of the big names in hosting, but it's trying to make the jump to cloud computing in a hybrid approach that might help bridge the gap between traditional hosting and cloud usage. But bad news can put a blight on corporate confidence, not only for the company experiencing the problem, but for others in that space as well.

[Update: TechCrunch has details from an incident report about the failure.]

Erik Sherman

Erik Sherman is a widely published writer and editor who also does select ghosting and corporate work. The views expressed in this column belong to Sherman and do not represent the views of CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.

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