Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee

David Gerard passes along a posting on Google's official blog announcing that they have extended the three-nines SLA for the Premier Edition of Google Apps from Gmail alone to also cover the Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Google Talk services. 99.9% uptime translates to 45 minutes a month of downtime, and the blog post puts this in context with Gmail's historical reliability, which has been between three and four times as good over the last year (10-15 min./mo.). It also claims, based on research by an outside group, that Gmail's historical reliability beats that of in-house hosted solutions such as Groupwise and Exchange, on average. Reader Ian Lamont adds an article in The Standard that digs down into the details of the SLA, revealing for instance that outages of less than 10 minutes aren't counted against the monthly 45 minutes.

Comments

3 9's is meaningless without customer support

[syousef]

The 99.9% guarantee is great, if there's someone to talk to who'll actually look at the problem when those three 9s aren't met. Otherwise it's marketing propaganda.

Re:Umm...

[ILongForDarkness]

Well if they cache the current session locally and it is just the connection to the back end that you lose temporarily I think it would be alright. Losing data sucks. That said who uses desktop suites without a crash? "Hopefully" (not sure if that is the right word to use when referring to an outage), they manage to have the downtime clumped together and planned in non-peak hours for the region (say upgrades done first Saturday of the month at midnight or something).

My big concern with this type of offering is it increases a companies dependence on their internet line. If your network is down not only can't retrieve files, email or browse, you now can't work on productivity software either. Essentially if your doing a job that requires a computer in this environment you can't work whenever the internet or network has a hickup. I like having something else to do in the rare instances where the network isn't working right.

Add to that the fact that wireless/laptops are becoming of larger importance in companies (and wireless is flaky at the best of times IMHO) you're really courting disaster not just in terms of outages but in terms of accidental data loss. Say your not so gifted technologically colleague decides to walk over to your desk with their laptop to show you the spreadsheet they've been working on. They get out of range of the router that they were using and presto session time out and the chance of data loss.