SaaS Week

After the much discussed outages at Gmail earlier in the week, many people are expressing doubts over the enterprise readiness of cloud computing technology and people's fears over lack of control of data seem to be reigning.

In a UK blog called Digital Home, writer Dean Evans concludes that the outages mean "cloud computing is far from being an everyday, reliable solution" and he notes the widespread impact of any potential outages.

Similarly, an eWeek piece by Clint Boulton states that Google Gmail and Google Apps are simply "not enterprise ready." But in the piece, Boulton interviewed several analysts, not all of whom agreed -- including IDCs Melissa Webster, who pointed out that nearly all companies have internal outages too even without cloud computing. Google's outages were just more visible. Boulton also interviewed Dana Gardner, who expressed similar sentiments and predicted that Web-based apps would get better over time but internal email systems probably wouldn't have the same "improvement trajectory."

Boulton still concludes that it's too risky to run an enterprise on Gmail and Google Apps and that it's best to wait a bit more time until outages aren't nearly as common -- likely a wise move for a major company, but is anyone really advocating a sudden mass migration of large enterprises onto a 100% cloud computing infrastructure at this point in time? I wouldn't say many people are, although that might be something we see in the future someday.

But as a side note, it is probably too early for these figures to exist, but it would be interesting to see a formal comparison of technology downtime for companies that are using SaaS and other enterprise cloud computing technologies compared to similar companies that have everything in house and managed by in house staff. In my days of working in an office, I recall the business "grinding to a halt" fairly frequently when the company intranet would go down or the email would be inaccessible. It does seem to me that outages are probably nothing new for companies (although I don't know any statistics for large enterprises). I suspect sometimes that these problems seem more threatening when you're not in the driver's seat -- similarly to how so many people (myself included) are more comfortable driving a car rather than flying on an airplane, even though the former is far riskier statistically.