2 Minute Read

By now you have probably heard of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and seen first-hand how this service impacts your day-to-day business operations. The service experienced some significant technical difficulties yesterday and broke the internet.


We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-East-1, which is impacting some other AWS services.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

For several hours on Tuesday, Amazon held much of the internet hostage while their web services team hurried to identify and correct the issue impacting the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Sites like Business Insider, Quora, Slack, and about 148,210 other sites experienced delays and outright crashes as a result of this outage. You may be wondering then, why are so many businesses and websites relying on cloud-based storage if a single outage can be so damaging? The answer is simple.

Increased reliability. Self-hosted data is on its way out. The time-savings and increased efficiency businesses and websites gain from storing data “on the cloud” far outweigh the risk of a widespread outage. It is cumbersome and increasingly expensive to store documents locally and, to Amazon’s credit, the last major outage was in September 2015. Cloud-based services have greater up-time (the S3 service is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability) and the majority of service errors are caught and corrected well before the end-user ever notices.

Lower costs per user. There is also a huge benefit to using a service that many other companies rely on. The cost of maintenance, upgrades, and repairs is disbursed across all users--making services like cloud-based storage much more cost effective for the individual user.

Unwieldy amounts of data. We are producing an unfathomable amount of new data every day. By 2020, it is estimated that we will be producing 1.7 megabytes of data per person every second. To put that in perspective, 1.7 MB is approximately equal to five 2-page PDF documents or six 400-word Word files. Consider that for a moment. 1.7 MB per person. EVERY SECOND. Maintaining company shared drives or even internal servers to store this tidal wave of data requires advanced technical expertise and failover redundancies. It is a model that is becoming more and more challenging for companies to manage in a cost-effective manner.

Cutting-edge technologies. Financial considerations aside, there are other benefits to cloud-based services. For instance, Knowledge360® allows users to upload all of their internal documents, preview the files within the browser, and search & filter these files with advanced semantic analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that helps even the most disorganized users stay organized. This results in huge time savings--the average Knowledge360® user saves 2 hours per business day—that individuals using traditional methods for storing and organizing information miss out on.

The bottom line. Web-based services like AWS and their S3 data storage service aren’t going anywhere anytime soon and we all need them to run our businesses with greater efficiency – even if the occasional outage brings everything to a screeching halt and spurs an uptick in the “Internet is Down” memes.

Begin the transition of your services to the cloud with a free 7-day trial of Knowledge360®, the cutting-edge intelligence and knowledge management solution your team needs to stay ahead of the competition. View our 90 second overview below and contact us to schedule a live demonstration.