The International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) formed in March 2012 by Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University has published on June 18, 2013, the second Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing (ARWC). This updated publication includes all data collected by the IWGCR in 2012.

In recent years, cloud computing has received considerable attention from global businesses and government agencies in economies. Regarding the potential and impact of cloud computing in the world, providing reliable services to meet the requirements of mission critical systems becomes more and more important. Meanwhile, the lack of reliability of cloud services is not commonly known by industry. In order to monitor and analyze cloud computing resiliency, IWGCR presents its short report aggregates information from press releases and provides a brief summary of availability of major cloud providers.

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Laurent Séguin, Coordinator of IWGCR, says “During third and fourth quarters of 2012, unavailability data published by Cloud providers themselves was taken into account in our information sources. Latest statistics show an average of 22.78 hours of downtime or 99.74% of availability in 2012. Average downtime in 2012 is thus three times higher than in previous estimates.”

Nicolas Guillaume, Head of Communication & Public Affairs EMEA of Cedexis, add “The causes of downtime are many and diverse. To reduce its effects, it is desirable for users of cloud computing to avoid centralizing their entire service and data from the same provider. Multi-provider strategies are now the rule to prevent damaging incidents and downtime.”

Jean-Paul Smets (pictured), CEO of ViFiB said “The disaster which happened at FirstServer in Japan caused the loss of data for more than 5,000 enterprises due to a combination of human error and software bug. It illustrates the reasons why disaster recovery procedures are still required for users of Cloud Computing services.”

Maurice Gagnaire, Professor at Telecom ParisTech adds “IWGCR works to improve data sources which Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing is based on. Improved data will help scientific studies and knowledge of Cloud resiliency.”

Christophe Cérin, Professor at Paris 13 University, concludes “The Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing – as any ranking – is tightly related to the estimation method which was adopted. Current ranking relies on public press reports and cloud provider reports. We encourage reading the report to understand the limitations of the current ranking and how we plan to improve it in the future.”

Current ranking (2007-2012) is: