24 Feb 2009
When Google’s online email service crashed for several hours this morning, did any IT managers considering the benefits of cloud computing feel a shudder?
For consumers, losing access to email for a few hours is at most an annoyance. But for a business that moves critical applications to the cloud, such an outage – especially when it is so out of its control – could have dramatic consequences.
The problems at Google Mail have highlighted the challenge that cloud computing providers face in convincing corporate IT decision-makers that the emerging model for delivering IT across the web is mature enough for serious business use.
Some companies, such as construction firm Taylor Woodrow and newspaper giant Guardian News & Media (GNM), have already switched away from Microsoft Office on local PCs to Google Apps.
GNM plans to go even further – ditching Lotus Notes for Google Mail later this year after completing the move of 2,400 users to the online word processing and calendars function.
“Google Apps delivers on the promise of collaborative working and is so straightforward and familiar that we knew our users would embrace the technology," said Guardian’s technology director Andy Beale.
Experts warn that any IT manager considering cloud computing services needs to take the same diligent approach that they would for implementing in-house IT.
“There are free services in the cloud, and commercial cloud services – you should get what you pay for. A service level is needed,” said Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst Quocirca.
“Cloud can be good – just like wine can be good. It can also be gut-rottingly horrible.”
Peter Thomas, former head of enterprise IT at Chubb Insurance and now an independent consultant, said the way Google responded to the crash was also a worry.
“I thought Google had massive redundancy in its server farms – it appears not – and it wants to provide corporate mail?” he said.
“Maybe posting information other than ‘try again in 30 seconds’ would have been a good idea.”
Freeform Dynamics analyst Jon Collins said the Google Mail failure shows that people should not simply assume that cloud computing is the way to go.
“The ‘Gfail’ emphasises the importance of due diligence in hosted service selection. The inherent idea that 'cloud is good' is flawed,” he said.
In January, online business software provider Salesforce.com crashed for about half an hour – not long for an internal application to disappear, but potentially critical for the thousands of firms relying on a web-based service.
Alex Hamer, a partner at City law firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, said companies that consider cloud computing need to also understand the legal implications of losing access to such a service.
"A company choosing to outsource its data storage risks claims being made against it by its customers if data held by the host server becomes unavailable during an interruption or outage, or even lost," he said.
"As most cloud computing service providers will not guarantee the security of the data they store, this may put cloud computing users in breach of their requirements under the Data Protection Act to ensure an appropriate level of security.”
Certainly, today’s problems at Google should prompt a pause for thought by any IT managers evaluating a move to cloud computing.
“Perhaps of greater concern to Google is the potential impact of problems such as this on its move to provide corporate mail via the Gmail platform,” said Thomas.
“I am sure its availability meets or exceeds that of most in-house mail systems, but problems such as today’s create the wrong impression.”
The most important question any enterprise can ask themselves is..How much value do they place on their data? All SaaS offerings, GMail or Google Apps are no exception are at their heart fundamentally flawed with their current delivery and licensing method. Apart from the service disruption issues, which btw actually affected Guardian users for up to 18 hours and caused international meetings to have to be cancelled, this could never happen in a fully active-active clustered on-premise option, there is the question of the system security, both in transit and storage, where is the data located, who sub-contracts the data storage function?...someone in India, Laos, China? What happens if this sub-contractor goes bust? Can you get your data back? Are you an organization that needs to retain data within a specific territory? Check out the Terms of Service very....very carefully. Most have a clause that prevents you from suing them if the service is unavailable and you lose revenue as a direct result of this.
Be warned and proceed with caution. As the old saying goes, don't jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Posted by: Pete H 22 Mar 2009
Clive's comment is spot on in my mind. It's easy to turn against cloud computing, but on-premise solutions are prone to fail too, indeed they could be seen as being even less reliable - be it software issues, hardware failures, network problems or even human error. Having customer service support 24/7 no matter where you or your employees are is vital for business sustainability. Global Giants with free or low-cost SaaS services are great when they work, but when things go wrong it's nice to have someone on the end of a phone that can help you along
Posted by: Dan Germain 25 Feb 2009
OK, so Google Mail went down for a short while, so what? Hotmail goes down on a frequent basis. Any IT profesional or corporate body who entrusts a third party to host critical things like email etc is stupid and shows a distinct disregard for safe and sound IT practice. They should stop trying to shirk responsibility and saving money and ensure a safe, secure, sound in-house syste. Otherwise, stop bleating you Morons.
By the way, I use (amongst others) "Gmail"
Posted by: Dave C 24 Feb 2009
What a lot of drivel, all systems experience outages or problems. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of users of more traditional IT systems have had more problems than a two hour loss of email.
It was fixed very quickly, at no expense to its users.
Posted by: CamCam 24 Feb 2009
According to another article, the people who pay money are guaranteed 99.9% uptime over a year and Google typicaly sees 10 minutes a month of downtime.
Even if you add the 4 hour block to the typical 2 hours per year down, they are at 99.93% uptime.
How many other email systems are up that much?
Posted by: bill 24 Feb 2009
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