When one the world’s biggest cloud applications has an outage, it immediately draws comment about whether the cloud model can truly support business.
This was certainly the case yesterday when Google’s Gmail service fell over following some routine software maintenance. This left many of the service’s 113 million business and personal users without access to their accounts for about 3 hours while engineers fixed the problem, as detailed here.
But when you think about it, the outage also showed how robust cloud applications can be. Look at those figures again: a service with over 100 million users fails, then is restored in under three hours.
Yes, it’s inconvenient for users during that time. But how many times a month or year does conventional business software crash? For how long? And at what cost of repair?
As the article above points out, business Gmail users have uptime guarantees – so are likely to be compensated for the inconvenience. Which is something that users of conventional users wouldn’t get from a software vendor.
In my view, the outage says more about how resilient cloud apps can be in the event of a problem.
craigcoward Cloud computing benefits, Cloud security
At analyst IDC’s recent Cloud Computing Forum in San Francisco, a survey of attendees showed that security is the number-one concern for IT managers when they think about cloud application deployments, followed by performance, availability, and the ability to integrate cloud services with in-house IT.
At face value, that makes perfect sense. But as this article from the UK news portal TechWorld points out, companies need to be realistic about the level of security they achieve inside their own business, and how that compares to the security available in the cloud.
As it says, how many companies can truly say their data on servers within the office is secure? How is it protected, and is it as robustly protected as it would be in the cloud?
It’s always worth asking a cloud service provider what security they offer. But just because it’s not in the server cabinet in the IT room doesn’t mean it’s vulnerable.
John Cummins, sales and marketing consultant
www.bestquarter.com
craigcoward Cloud security
This story in The Guardian’s online technology supplement shows how a Yorkshire-based small business, Allgas, will soon be benefiting from Gooroo Software’s cloud applications. The company believes it will help it to minimise IT costs and boost efficiency.
John Cummins, sales and marketing consultant
www.bestquarter.com
craigcoward Cloud computing benefits, IT cost savings
When Microsoft says something, it’s always worth listening to. Especially when it involves moving to a new model of software delivery that doesn’t involve physical disks or boxes. Of course, they have a vested interest in cloud computing, but it’s interesting to get their viewpoint simply because of who they are.
In this case, Doug Hauser, Microsoft’s general manager of business strategy, cloud infrastructure services, said that a weakened economy will help to push businesses from on-premise computing to accessing cloud services
He added that the small-to-medium business sector was “looking at [cloud computing] adoption anyway, regardless of the economic climate.”
What’s clear is that Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing is strong, and based on solid economics where Microsoft makes money while the consumer saves cash. It’s a sure sign of where software and solutions are heading — and how the most influential software companies are putting their weight behind the model.
John Cummins, sales and marketing consultant
www.bestquarter.com
craigcoward Cloud computing benefits, cloud predictions cloud computing, cloud growth, cloud predictions, cloud services
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John Cummins, sales and marketing consultant
www.bestquarter.com
john Cloud computing benefits, cloud predictions