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Gmail Outage Rattles Cloud Computing Confidence

Google is recruiting solution and managed services providers to its army of resellers that promote switching from expensive, client-side software packages such as Microsoft Office to the less-expensive, cloud-based Google Apps suite. Google’s promise to partners and paying subscribers: affordability and reliability. After the second email service outage this month, Google is fending off growing […]

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Lawrence Walsh

Sep 24, 2009

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Google is recruiting solution and managed services providers to its army of resellers that promote switching from expensive, client-side software packages such as Microsoft Office to the less-expensive, cloud-based Google Apps suite. Google’s promise to partners and paying subscribers: affordability and reliability.

After the second email service outage this month, Google is fending off growing user complaints about the stability of its platform and the reliability of its business-class services. This morning an untold number of Gmail subscribers lost access to their accounts for more than 2 ½ hours due to undisclosed technical errors. Earlier this month, a larger outage happened while Google was migrating servers.

Google is hardly alone in the cloud with maintaining availability and reliability.

Reports say Twitter has secured $100 million in fresh funding to cover the costs of expanding its infrastructure and service capacity, which will eliminate the frequent service disruptions.

Facebook error messages on profile posts and messaging tools have become so common that users have started several community groups to vent their frustrations.

Many solution providers and business managers want to think that user experience in cloud-based applications are shaped by business-class applications like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, but many of the millennials are growing up on Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking applications.

The question is whether these hiccups and inconsistencies in publicly available Web applications and services will impede the adoption of cloud computing? Will outages like this morning’s Gmail disruption embolden users to demand better service or will users be conditioned to accept poor quality of service and periodic disruptions as normal?

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Gmail Outage Rattles Cloud Computing Confidence

Lawrence Walsh

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