Office 365, Google Docs go down again, could give pause to the cloud..

[JMH]

Office 365, Google Docs go down again, could give pause to the cloud-wary

Outages are becoming a distressing fact of life for Microsoft’s cloud e-mail customers, and users of other cloud services such as Google Apps. Two weeks of e-mail glitches plagued Exchange Online customers using Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in May. Office 365, the successor to BPOS which launched in late June, suffered an e-mail outage in August and then again last night and this morning.

Google Docs suffered an outage this week, and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform was plagued by outages and lost customer data in April and August.

Office 365, Google Docs go down again, could give pause to the cloud-wary

 

[smarteyeball]

Nice little example of the clouds very large Achilles heel.

 

[pparks1]

Of course, when you look at these services over a longer period of time they look pretty good. For example, gmail had an uptime in 2010 of 99.984%. That works out to approx 7 minutes per month of services being unavailable. Quite often, personal users and businesses have FAR more downtime than this.

 

[legacy7955]

Problem is that "The Cloud" is totally unpredictable ....you never know when that glitch or problem is going to hit and God help you if your data is only stored on the cloud. It might be gone forever.

Death to the cloud and internet 2.

 

[jimbo45]

Who needs the cloud -- this type of disruption will always happen !!!

Hi all
To those who have 100% faith in Cloud Computing -- it will NEVER happen

There will ALWAYS be glitches- nothing to do with hackers / 09/11 incidents / terrorism etc.

There just ISN't and can never be a 100% robust safe system -- whatever the technology so long as it's managed by "Humans" and especially by Humans who haven't a clue about the service they are supposed to be managing.

In my experience 99% of projects fail --not because of the underlying technology or even the I.T staff working on the project but usually its because the management is so AMATEUR and overrule their own technicians without having a decent clue as to what they are doing apart from following some obscure rules sent out by some "Bean counter" from a remote corporate headquarters whose only worried about next weeks share price on Wall St.

-- I'm sure a lot of people on this very board have instances of having to undo screw ups caused by non technical management taking or worse still making technical decisions.

BBC News - Microsoft online services hit by major failure

Cheers

jimbo

 

[pparks1]

Guess what, failures happen at home as well as in the corporate workplace as well. This is no different. Except the amount of uptime in the cloud is likely better. In 2010, gmail was something like.99.984 uptime. That's an average of 7 minutes per month of downtime. That's very respectable.

 

[jimbo45]

Of course, when you look at these services over a longer period of time they look pretty good. For example, gmail had an uptime in 2010 of 99.984%. That works out to approx 7 minutes per month of services being unavailable. Quite often, personal users and businesses have FAR more downtime than this.

Hi there
This type of Statiistic while nice mathematically doesn't actually bear any connection to a users actual reality.

If it's a Friday night 15 mins before Stock Market close and you are trying to get out of a "Bad trade" then if you can't access your service it doesn't matter an iota if the service has a relative uptime of 97% If it's not available when YOU want to use it then it's a problem.

While management can sit back and say we've kept within our "Service agreements" it's a very different story for the end user who DOES get a problem.

In my experience I've fortunately NEVER suffered an outage on a friday night when I need to exit a Bad trade using "Classical Internet" or typical online broker services.

I certainly wouldn't rely on "The Cloud" - especially as the servers just aren't adequately equipped to deal with possibly an almost infinite number of people attempting to log on at unpredicatable times especially when many 100,000's want to do it at the same time.

cheers
jimbo

 

[Layback Bear]

I's simple for me. When Clouds are used you loose control and security. You make sure that updates are not done at crucial times ect.

 

[pparks1]

If it's a Friday night 15 mins before Stock Market close and you are trying to get out of a "Bad trade" then if you can't access your service it doesn't matter an iota if the service has a relative uptime of 97% If it's not available when YOU want to use it then it's a problem.

Would that same thing not be true of your internet provider, your power in your home/business, etc?

While management can sit back and say we've kept within our "Service agreements" it's a very different story for the end user who DOES get a problem.

And for some home users, if their computer went down and they didn't keep a backup they might be in hot water. If they had some stuff on a cloud, they might be able to access their data from a phone, from their game console, from an internet cafe, etc.

I'm just not in as much of a panic about cloud computing as many others seem to be. In fact, I already do quite a bit of cloud stuff. Lots of my contacts are in facebook, my email is in gmail, lots of pictures in photobucket, and other files stored in dropbox. These outside choices have been very reliable for me.

 

[Layback Bear]

Well I'm sure facebook Youtube and mail get hacked often. They are clouds.

 

[Win7User512]

I've always been cautious of the Cloud. Between the cloud provider and my internet provider, if there is an outage on either end, the cloud is useless to me.

 

[jimbo45]

If it's a Friday night 15 mins before Stock Market close and you are trying to get out of a "Bad trade" then if you can't access your service it doesn't matter an iota if the service has a relative uptime of 97% If it's not available when YOU want to use it then it's a problem.

Would that same thing not be true of your internet provider, your power in your home/business, etc?

While management can sit back and say we've kept within our "Service agreements" it's a very different story for the end user who DOES get a problem.

And for some home users, if their computer went down and they didn't keep a backup they might be in hot water. If they had some stuff on a cloud, they might be able to access their data from a phone, from their game console, from an internet cafe, etc.

I'm just not in as much of a panic about cloud computing as many others seem to be. In fact, I already do quite a bit of cloud stuff. Lots of my contacts are in facebook, my email is in gmail, lots of pictures in photobucket, and other files stored in dropbox. These outside choices have been very reliable for me.

Hi there
I have a "dongle" as well so an alternative Internet provider just in case --the chance of TWO independent providers being "out of business"' at the same time is statistically very unlikely;

With the Cloud - two providers won't necessarily be "two different" providers --they might be using the same set of remote servers --and probably are.

With my ISP's I know who provides the backbone systems and they ARE separate.

Cheers
jimbo