The Wrong Conclusion: My Business cannot afford outages, That's why I don't want to go to the Cloud

Gmail was down today for most users for at least an hour, with Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Play and some other Google services remaining down for another hour or more. A side effect: attempts to access Google services during the outage was causing Google Chrome to crash.

Facebook was down today for about 15 minutes, following another brief outage on November 30.

Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes went down for five hours on November 13, following a brief period the previous week when mail delivery was slow.

Apple’s iCloud mail service went down on September 10 for almost two million people, and stayed down for two days.

I could go on and on......

There are the usual articles online today advising businesses to beware of trusting the cloud. One New York Times blogger wrote: “The cutoff highlights the downside of relying on information stored only in the cloud of the Internet, particularly for businesses that pay to use Google Apps, including Gmail, Docs for word processing and Drive for file storage.”

That’s the wrong conclusion. The honest and correct conclusion is:

Outages happen.

Fact of the matter is that outages happen on your own networks far more often than they do in the cloud and the effects of those outages usually have far more in the way of consequences. Outages happen on the equipment in your office. Your servers, workstations or backup systems will fail at unpredictable times and for unpredictable periods of time due to hardware or other issues beyond anyone's control.

How long has email been around? Email is a cloud solution, mostly provided by companies operating in the cloud (The Internet) and sometimes in a Private cloud hosted on your own premises. I can state with absolute certainty that everyone has experienced outages  due to a variety of factors.

If I had to wager a guess, most of the naysayers out there either have a vested interest in the technology they currently supply you or they were influenced by those self serving interests who currently service their infrastructure.

The really important thing to consider is that outages do happen and that no one is capable of delivering technology  100% of the time, 24x7, 365 days a year.

As long as you choose your suppliers and cloud platforms carefully, the Cloud WILL be in your future. The big companies are building very resilient infrastructures for cloud services and continue to get better and better at it on a daily basis.

Your business is driven in part by economics and the fact is, sooner or later, you're business IT will be in the cloud, you simply will not be able to afford to ignore it.



Listen Up - There will be challenges but it's still going to happen and it will be relatively FAST. Let's make certain the transition is done correctly and for the right reasons.

The Age of the Disposable Computer

You've just purchased a brand new MacBook, Windows 8 Tablet or any of the other new tablets or smartphones on the market.

You've paid $1,000 plus for it and you are very, very happy. After a period of time, usually a year, your warranty runs out. You are very, very happy.

Then the unthinkable happens and it just stops working. No problem you think... I'll just call my computer guy and he will fix it and make it better... And that is when it dawns on you.....

You're pretty much screwed and you have to buy a new one. You've just spent $400, $700, $800 or spent over a $1,000 a little over a year ago and you cannot get it fixed?

Your computer guy is nowhere to be found because he's out of business. He used to build computers for people, replace hard drives when they broke etc..... That's OK because you know where he lives and you call him up for help but... he cannot do a thing for you. Why?

When you bought that shiny new MacBook, PC, Laptop computer or tablet, what you didn't realize is that the manufacturer had built it NOT to be serviced.

• That shiny new MacBook was built with the hard drive, and memory sticks soldered to the motherboard. None of it can efficiently be replaced by a neighborhood technician. Many Microsoft based ultrabooks are built the same way. Soon all laptops will be built that way.
• The shiny new laptop that you paid for is built in such a way that a technician has to take the entire thing apart just to get to the hard drive. The labor costs to do this are prohibitive so you just replace it.
• All of a sudden you realize that shiny new desktop with Windows 8 you bought last year didn't come with recovery media to reinstall Windows, didn't offer to help you create recovery media yourself and doesn't even have a label with the Windows activation key. 

What the hay! That sickening feeling comes over you..... You're sunk.

So there it is. It may not be environmentally friendly but those are the economic metrics of todays high tech sector.

If you read my previous post on the Big Switch, you probably know just one of the driving forces behind all of this.

Not all is lost. The economic metrics will give birth to new businesses that will help you in many cases. Desktops for example, are still reasonably easy to service for example and there will still be methods to deal with those in a cost effective manner. Custom built desktops for business will be a viable option although you will pay more for them.

Those shiny new ultra thin, ultra light devices are something else however.... still, someone may come up with something. After all, they are selling millions of those aren't they? Then again, I said that about the millions of smart phones being produced.

The Big Switch is happening, get it. If you didn't read my post, maybe this will help. When you watch this, think about whatever shiny device you just bought.