There are few things in the tech world that are the sole responsibility of one company, but Adobe has managed to monopolize cloud-based technology for the general public. When it went down on May 14 in the early evening Eastern Standard Time, it forced many to think twice about using the cloud for their document storage. For more than 24 hours, the Creative Cloud Suite (CCS) was offline, and so were many users.
The result has brought about many complaines that having only one company responsible for such massive amounts of data could be a detriment to productivity for thousands of people. Moreover, having one company dominating the cloud may have wideranging effects affecting mutiple industries.
Adobe issued a maintenance message shortly after the outage began stating that the CCS had gone down, along with Adobe Business Catalyst, which is an email hosting platform for email fundraising and e-commerce.
At $600 for individuals or $840 for teams or companies, the CCS has become the go-to cloud based solution for users and companies in order to store files that can be accessed from multiple locations in real time. But throwing that trust into one company has led to security concerns that if Adobe has another outage, a longer one, it could adversely affect a company's ability to do business.
"The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID," Adobe says on its blog. "We want to apologize for this outage because we know how critical our services are to you and how disruptive it's been to those of you who felt the impact."
It had announced a little over a day later via its Twitter account that the outage had been solved and CCS and other platforms were functioning as they should. It is unclear exactly what had caused the outage beyond Adobe's blog post claims that it was the result of maintenance on the platform.
In the end, the tech world is beginning to look for alternatives and it could help other companies enter the fray of cloud-based solutions that enable users to put files into a digital space for further viewing. Adobe has been adamant that they took all the necessary security precautions and once the outage was discovered, worked vigorously to fix it.
However, the company's reasons offer little solace for those who rely on CCS for their business and personal needs. For many, it signals the need for more competition in the cloud.
