Following Gmail's period of downtime today, I'm surprised that the issue today actually gained so much air time and coverage - it was on the BBC News frontpage for most of the day today.
It is quite easy to feel the urge to turn against cloud computing or SaaS, but let's remember that on-premise solutions are prone to fail too, indeed they could be seen as being even less reliable - be it software issues, hardware failures, network problems or even human error.
Gmail’s up-time record is actually pretty good, ~15 minutes out per month according to them today. But if you're paying for a business-class service, even a few minutes offline can be disruptive to a business.
As the CTO of a hosted email provider I can feel their pain. It's important that services have guarantees for 99.9% uptime or better, access to a real person on the Service Desk when things go wrong, so you know problems are taken care of. I know that our customers prefer the reassurance that a managed service provider gives, especially at times like these. Having customer service support 24/7 no matter where you or your employees are is vital for business sustainability. Global Giants with free or low-cost SaaS services are great when they work, but when things go wrong its nice to have someone on the end of a phone that can help you along.
Too true! However we're doing just that at Cobweb at the moment - we're set internal SLAs for services and OLAs for support and delivery between our teams.
We're too small for any SLA penalties to be put in place (read financial), but we'll be measuring them on our scorecards. It'll be interesting when the next round of annual appraisals come around for our internal tech guys.
Posted by: Dan Germain | February 28, 2009 at 04:14 PM
Try getting an SLA for email availabilty from an internal IT department!
Posted by: Bob Tarzey | February 28, 2009 at 08:30 AM
Completely agree. Support is where the value for money really kicks in, in my opinion. I'm glad to say that our downtime with Cobweb has been minimal and vastly better than the previous in-house system
Posted by: Nick Barron | February 25, 2009 at 07:19 AM