Google admitted earlier this month that it’s Gmail service failed again, just weeks after the company suffered a huge system outage following a data centre cock up.
It confirmed that a “small subset of users” have been affected by the latest downtime, but didn’t provide a definitive number and could not confirm when the service would be back up and running.
Google Aps is simply not an enterprise level suite of applications yet. (It may well get there but isnt even close yet)
Firstly it is still in Beta testing mode - this means you have no service level agreement with Google. They can take the whole system down without warning, meaning guess what…..none of your staff can work! They also state in the terms and conditions when you signup that they cannot guarantee the safety of your data and are free to use your data for marketing purposes if they please. Brilliant!
Once you are in, you’re locked in - People for years have complained that they are locked into Microsoft’s software stack. Well if you start using Google Apps you’re now in a similar situation! Any smart company should put in place a plan for the future. What if you come to realise you didn’t want to host your application on the Google App Engine anymore? Good luck, almost everything you are given access to is proprietary — that means all your data is locked into a format that isn’t like a traditional relational database. This could turn into a disaster for your business if you rely on a custom built app. (more…)