Paradise Lost: How the Amazon outage set cloud computing back years, but helped Cisco

The New York Times said “Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts.” I think that this is the best thing that could have happened for Cisco.

While the problem that effected AWS and its many customers is not a good thing at all and I feel bad for all of those companies, Cisco has an opportunity. Many customers who are in the cloud or are thinking about the cloud will be rethinking any decision now. Cisco has the opportunity to push the private cloud.

REDUNDANCY FAILURE: Amazon EC2 outage calls ‘availability zones’ into question

By pushing the private cloud Cisco has a chance to boost sales to customers and get back to its roots. While the public cloud was a little win for Cisco, enabling the sales to those cloud companies, the bigger deal for Cisco is to keep its enterprise customers using their own gear in house: selling upgrades to routers, switches and selling the UCS is a great possibility.

The cloud’s reputation was handed a huge setback by Amazon and it will be felt for years as many companies will not risk moving applications to the cloud. I think that storage to the cloud may recover its reputation faster, as this is much different than day-to-day applications or web services. If companies are still going to use the cloud for web services or web sites, they need to have a backup in case something happens to their cloud company.

Cisco has a huge opportunity to cash in on this AWS problem; can Chambers rally his executives to push the private cloud? Will the company ramp up a private cloud push for Interop? I would like to see Cisco do this but only time will tell.