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Outages Leave Google Apps Admins In the Hotseat
snydeq writes "This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch — and many of them are second-guessing their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports. The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article. 'If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter, we'd probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail system, if we used it at all,' said one Apps admin. 'And it would likely be years before we'd try a cloud-based collaborative system again from any vendor.' Coupled with recent Apple and Amazon cloud issues, these Google outages are being viewed by some as big wins for Microsoft."
isnt there any other vendor out there providing business solutions ? its not like everyone is going to jump into exchange wagon because they couldnt do with google apps. geez.
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Google has a Service Level Agreement. If they have excessive downtime, you can get up to 15 days of free service. No refunds.
Tell that to your boss. It's not your problem. That's what the company signed up for. Welcome to "cloud computing".
Those IT manager using the free service and expecting mission critical uptime should really go out more often and get a grip on reality.
Let's see, to set up my own five/nine email servers I would need at least two hosting location on different backbone, each of them should have at least two redundant servers. And of course I should have one spare that I can ship express whenever one fail.
Fixed Cost (Investment)
Monthly Recurring Cost
Implementation time
Of course I pulled the numbers out of my hat but it should be enough to show that there is no way a SOHO will ever have the mean to do it and that it is unrealistic to expect that kind of service for free or cheap.
There was a GMail outage on Monday, which was reported in their blog:
[blog entry]
I've read rumors about other Google Apps outages later last week, but nothing official and saw no evidence of them myself.
The amount of downtime each individual user experiences from their local Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office installations is far higher than the few hours per year people may experience with hosted apps.
The sign-up page for Google Apps Premier says you get 99.9% uptime. That's about 1/3 of a day downtime per year, or a couple of hours per quarter.
Google seems to be managing to hit that 99.9% uptime, just not exceed it. VERY few in-house e-mail systems actually manage 99.9% uptime, especially when you consider scheduled maintenance and downtime (remember, Google's 99.9% is for all downtime)
In fact, I have seen very few Exchange systems that manage much more than 99% uptime. However, for those organizations, there are other compelling advantages to Exchange.
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I'm a professional writer and a recent convert to Google apps. I've been using Gmail since its inception for my business and personal email, and have recently been investigating using Google Docs. The word processor started off as little more than a text editor but nowadays is pretty balanced in terms of features.
The main benefit is that it's all cross-platform, and I haven't got to worry about where my docs are stored (no messing about with a USB key stick, for example). I can access my work from any computer, running virtually any OS (provided Firefox is installed), virtually anywhere in the world.
I really do think this is one possible future route for productivity applications on a computer. When viewed in this light, online apps are very compelling.
The only issue is, as mentioned, outages. Every now and again (maybe twice a year), Gmail is inaccessible. If Google Docs is inaccessible, I'm stuffed and can't work. This is why I use Google Gears to hold local copies of docs, but this is still in beta testing. But a local backup is, of course, always a good idea.
Based on my own personal experiences with dealing with google, I would never trust anything besides their search engine... If you have ever tried to make contact with google staff about a real issue, you'll soon notice there is no customer service, no help desk, you will be greeted by an arrogant 16-year-old who tells you to goto the google.com site to resolve whatever issue you're calling about. Also, if you've ever tried using Google Checkout (what a joke), they put arbitrary holds on the money and attempts to resolve issues (again, no customer service here) take weeks and months. Google has a great search engine, but thats about it. Don't put your eggs in one basket by using anything that they put out. They're good at writing crawlers and indexers, not good at much else.
I'm quite happy with Google Apps and all the uncertainty that comes with beta applications. I give credit to Google for keeping as much uptime as they do for such a robust, free suite. Sure, I've seen a few outages with Google. But I never lost any mail as with MobileMe. I actually dropped my MobileMe account in favor of Google Apps. Uptime was one reason, and so wasn't the fact that MobileMe mail isn't searchable beyond subject line. Occasionally losing connectivity is one thing. Paying $99/year for for that sort of service is quite unreasonable.