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.