4/30/09

Gmail: Can it be trusted?

In Mail and Gmail and More on Mail and Gmail, I discuss my move to Gmail as my main avolio.com mail server.

Gmail Glitch Shows Pitfalls starts off with “When Google Inc.’s online-email service shut off for over two hours earlier this week, it brought to light concerns about whether businesses can safely rely on software that their employees access over the Internet.” The Wall Street Journal On-line article goes on to say, “… companies are finding that going online to do business-computing tasks via services like Google’s … comes with a risk: When something goes wrong, customers must sit idly while waiting for someone else to fix the problem.”

I say this is FUD. Who doesn’t have to suffer occasional outages? Servers go down, ISPs disconnect occasionally, cables get cut. Owning the servers and employing those who run them may feel safer, but I suspect does little to mitigate the risk of an outage.

Is it worth the risk? I think so.

3 comments:

Fred Avolio said…

Google — most of Google in various cities — was down or an hour or less today. I am surprised that Twitter didn’t go down.

Anyway, I assume, this cause @TruSecure to Tweat” “holy crap people…what’s Latin for “you get what you pay for?” So your gmail doesn’t work; get back to work. Get paid. Pay e-mail provider.”

I agree people should not take an outage like this.But, the unsaid assumption is if you pay for an email service it will never go down like this. That is simply not true.

Fred Avolio said…

Explained on the Google Blog

Fred Avolio said…

A nice follow-on to this is Kelly Jackson Higgins' DarkReading column, The 6 Worst Cloud Security Mistakes.