A major infrastructure outage in Ireland affecting managed hosting services supplied by Amazon and Microsoft has highlighted the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity in the sector.
Both Amazon's EC2 cloud service and Microsoft's BPOS desktop virtualization suite were knocked offline after severe storms hit infrastructure in the country.
Manual recovery of servers led to delays in restoring connectivity and the fall-out was expected to continue for some time.
A spokesperson for Amazon said: "We anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed."
Fortunately the bad weather did not block communications for the firm, which said: "Throughout the incident, we updated our customers regularly on the issue via our normal communication channels."
The outages show that taking preventative action is a must, as is planning for every eventuality.
Industry expert Riccardo Degli Effetti told Computing.co.uk: "Both cloud and traditional managed hosting have to rely on well-maintained infrastructure to function."
Recently, MTM Technologies told SearchDataCenter.com that companies which ignore the disaster recovery potential of cutting-edge technologies like desktop virtualization are "foolish".