Cloud Computing -- When will it be Good Enough? ... UPDATED

Tony Austin
Saturday, 30 August 2008 10:23

Opinion and Analysis

All sorts of questions come to mind. Will the cloud computing application service provider care for your business (be it commercial, government, or whatever) as much as you do or are legally obliged to? If a foreign provider, will they operate under their laws or yours? If they're around the other side of the world, will they be able or willing to react fast enough to meet your needs and expectations (e.g., during regular business hours in your own time zone)? Mind you, local in-country service providers might do no better or worse than some overseas providers!

What are your own intentions? Have you already had any successes with cloud computing services (or failures)? Are you going to stay with your desktops systems only for the short term, or eventually abandon them?

What concerns or issues do you have with this new approach? Do you trust the cloud service providers to safely deliver the goods? Let us know in via the iTWire comments system.

UPDATE (02 September 2008):
As a case in point, it seems there were several outages affecting Gmail availability for Google Apps Premier users early in August (on 6th, 11th and 15th, lasting from a few hours to a day or more for some Apps Premier users). In late August, Google sent an apologetic e-mail memo to Apps Premier administrators, automatically extending at no charge the Apps Premier users' subscriptions by 15 days, which corresponds to the maximum for meeting the 99.9 percent uptime for the Premier Apps service. The fee for this service is US $50 annually per user.

The Google memo apparently said that while they can't guarantee zero downtime they're committed to quick resolution of outages: "We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have." They've committed to enhancing the Google Apps Dashboard to better keep users advised.