The Impact of Google's Outage on Cloud Adoption

I wanted to reply to all the doom and gloom reporting on cloud services today. First the facts!

Yesterday 14% of Google's users were unable to access services offered by the Search Sovereign, including Gmail. This outage was caused by an overloaded data center in Asia. The outage was repaired in under an hour and everything was back to normal.

Paul Mah, the esteemed editor at FierceCIO offered us an editorial today about how the Google outage is making people rethink the reliability of cloud services. He says that the disruption "...crystallized many peoples' fear--subconsciously or consciously--that we rely too heavily on cloud services. You see, while few would dispute that such services are incredibly convenient, there is no guarantee that a particular organization will not just close down without warning."

First off, he is arguing two very separate points:

1. The Google outage did cause consternation to users, however the error was quickly corrected. In short, the outage caused no more harm than a power failure. No one shouts that we should reconsider electricity because of a power outage. Why should we reconsider the cloud because of one incident? That's just plain silly.

Incidentally, the only people that have the right to complain about Google service outages are those who are paying for premium services. Everyone that is using free Google services should shut the hell up! There is nobody worse than someone who complains about freebies. Just be grateful it works at all, you jerks.

2. It is true that there are no guarantees that a cloud company will survive. But that can be said for any business that provides a service! Whenever you hire a service provider for your business you should do your homework. Don't partner with a company that has no path to profitability. I don't think we need to worry about Google disappearing any time in the near future.

In short, this is all nonsense. Rethinking the validity and utility of the cloud because of a 40 minute Google service outage is ridiculous. It must be a slow news day for tech reporters...