Sure this can happen in an onsite/on premise mail system as well, but what recourse does the user have for these free services when things go wrong? This week it was announced that Gmail deleted mail for a number of users here
How would you handle it if your clients mail was deleted with little recourse for recovery?
Wayne,
Information stored in the ‘cloud’ is stored on the same frail technology you would use internally. Bottom line is still subject to failure. Firstly, just because you store data away from your premises doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be backing it up. The cloud doesn’t change that need. Secondly, this outage apparently affected less than 0.2% of gmail users. That is still a lot of people given gmail users but as an absolute percentage it is still small. Finally, Google did make the issue public and recovered the data from tape (after a time delay).
We need to be careful when reading these types of stories to determine the facts and retain objectivity. Any new technology is always subject to hysteria and mis-reporting. However, what it does highlight is that no matter where your data is stored the question is are you backing it up and more importantly when did you last restore it? No good doing that in an emergency and finding the backups didn’t work. If your data is valuable then treat with the respect it is due no matter where it is stored.
Thanks
Robert
I agree with Robert. BPOS has outages all the time (I monitor their RSS feed) and nobody seems to mention that. Also, there are several options to automatically backup your Google Apps account even if you have lots of users. Not so with any hosted Exchange I know of.
The cloud does not release people from protecting their data it still needs to be backed up as if it were on premise.
Robert/Anthony,
I totally agree with your points of view – my key thought is that with the cloud, does not mean that you as the user should EVER give up your obligation to protect your own data. Just because it’s not on your server, does not mean it’s not your problem. Many people I feel are placing too much responsibility on the cloud when they should be shouldering some of it themselves.
Wayne
Wayne,
It also demonstrates that even with cloud technology good providers are still a must so I don’t understand why so many resellers are so frightened by it.
Ah well more business for me. Bring it on I say.
Thanks
Robert