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Data from the FCC indicated that as of August 17, more than 16,000 cable and wireline customers remained without service in the six cities impacted by the fires on Maui.
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Mobile access has recovered more quickly.
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An AWS representative told Silverlinings that its Disaster Response team is on the ground on the island.
The Hawaiian island of Maui has been devastated by fires over the past few weeks, with the flames laying waste primarily to six cities and their inhabitants. Though it seems there’s not much cloud infrastructure there to be impacted, access to cloud services has emerged as a key issue.
According to data center tracker Baxtel, there are seven data centers in the state of Hawaii, but all of these appear to be located on the island of O’ahu – not Maui. They appear to primarily be run by local telecom companies such as ServPac and SystemMetrics rather than any of the big cloud providers. Indeed, a representative for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said the company doesn’t have any data centers on Maui.
Internet access on Maui is the chink in cloud redundancy armor
Still, you don’t need to have a data center in your city (or, in this case, on your island) to access cloud services. You just need an internet connection. At least for the residents of Maui over the past few weeks, that’s been a problem.
Disaster reporting data from the Federal Communications Commission indicated that as of August 17, more than 16,000 cable and wireline customers remained without service in the six cities impacted by the fires. That number was down from more than 25,000 on August 9, but recovery from August 12 onward appeared slow.
Mobile access has recovered more quickly. All 21 cell towers in the six affected cities were initially down, though by August 17, only five remained out of service.
An AWS representative told Silverlinings that its Disaster Response team is on the ground on the island and has found there are two main barriers currently affecting cloud services there. The first is availability of hardware, such as laptops and networking equipment. The second? Internet access.
“Many areas of the island were completely disconnected after the fires, making it impossible to enable cloud workloads if you could not access the cloud,” the representative wrote. “AWS Disaster Response team is helping enable this access, so that cloud services can then be used to better enable response and recovery efforts.”
Gartner VP of Cloud Services and Technologies Sid Nag told Silverlinings access is the chink in the cloud’s redundancy armor.
He noted the cloud has been built with resiliency in mind from the get-go, with redundant and overlapping cloud zones, fallback to other regions and other architectural features. But if a customer doesn’t have access via a private connection or the public internet, they’re out of luck.
Nag noted this might not be such a problem for large, multi-national corporations with many branch offices. After all, if one location loses access, another branch can still pull the necessary data down from the cloud. But for small, local businesses – perhaps like those in Maui – the loss of access also means the loss of the cloud and its services and data.
Thus, while there’s been no widespread failure of physical cloud infrastructure on Maui, Nag said for all intents and purposes the island is basically down – at least until connectivity is restored.
For what it’s worth, Nag noted internet access isn’t the only leg of the stool keeping the cloud afloat. If the electrical grid fails, similar problems arise.
Silverlinings reached out to Google Cloud, as well as local providers ServPac and DRFortress, about their efforts in Maui but had not received replies as of press time. Microsoft highlighted its relief efforts, specifically pointing to its collaboration with the American Red Cross and Planet on the use of its AI for Good Lab to provide a damage assessment that could aid their work.
Take from all this what you will. While Maui is indeed isolated, the issues accessing the cloud seen there could easily happen elsewhere. And we should be prepared.
Managing Editor Elizabeth Coyne contributed to this story.