Cloud Computing Reality Check: Gmail Goes Down For A Day
Reason enough to stay out of the cloud, and miss out on reduced IT expenses? Cloud defenders will say that locally-hosted applications can and do fail too. True. But when company email goes down, or worse, an ERP system like accounts receivable or general ledger processing (note both SAP (SAP) and Oracle (ORCL) are talking up the cloud), there are still options. If you manage your own data on-site, you can glower at your IT team and threaten them with bodily harm. You can devise an interim solution by pulling old email address or customer account data from a tape backup. And most important, you can get an answer as to what exactly went wrong so you can take steps it won't happen again.
Go with a cloud computing solution, and your option set is different: Call your support hotline. Attempt to convince the outsourced customer service rep the problem is real and you're not imagining it. Then wait as patiently as you can until you hear things have been fixed.
Good luck.
See also:
Larry Ellison: Someone Explain To Me This "Cloud Computing" Thing My Company Is Committing To
Open Source Guru Richard Stallman: Cloud Computing "Worse Than Stupidity"
Sounds like a spot of local difficulty.
So that's not a good example of "cloud fail" in my opinion.
if you ever visited your IT department (if you still have one nearby) you will know, they are generally understaffed and with the kinda low budget they got, competent IT guy is of rare commodity that can really come out and fix serious email system failures in 24 hours!! no freaking way....
so now your only choice is to keep your ERP/email system really dumb, simple & non progressive so as to make sure your IT guys can handle the failures in case. but is that really worth it? by being afraid of that less than four 9s availability provided by cloud computing, you end up with a far less competitive ERP/email system to help w/ your business and you still have to fork out $$$ for incompetent IT department for sure.
Off-line access. If the mail server goes down here people can still acces their e-mail client and review work on old stuff and queue itmes up to be sent out.
Excel, like most other businesses we use excel heavily in the sales department and some in accounting for quick apps. The google spreadsheet application is no where close to excel for usability.
The thought of housing our spreadsheets on the internet is a hard concept for folks to embrace
Gmail, doesn't have an easy way to for managers to track incoming and outgoing mail annomously. That need doesn't happen often but when it does it's usally urgent.
I use gmail for my personal use and love it, but it's not ready yet for us in our corporate enviornment.
Or how about using a program like MailShadow to allow your employees to work within Outlook, but use Gmail as the mail server? http://www.cemaphore.com/trialform.php
Businesses already use cloud applications – salesforce.com is one of the most popular.
If paying customers were effected and got bad support, that is terrible. (Let us know?)
DivX to DVD Converter for Mac can not only convert DivX to DVD Mac, but also support convert AVI to DVD, 3GP to DVD, MP4 to DVD, FLV to DVD, MPEG to DVD, WMV to DVD, etc.
The DivX to DVD Converter Mac developed only for Mac OS (include Mac OS X 10.5 leopard) burning users.
The DivX to DVD converter for Mac can convert all formats like MP4, M4V, MPA, MPG, MPEG, MOV,3GP, 3GP2, FLV, MOV,VOB, DAT, TS, TP, TRP, M2TS, DivX, DivX to DVD on Mac OS.
AVI to DVD for Mac, a profeesional but easy-to-use DVD burn software for Mac users, can convert AVI to DVD format on Mac OS X perfectly and quickly. The AVI to DVD Mac not only supports converting AVI to DVD Mac but also supports other popular formats to DVD on Mac, such as MPA, ASF, DIF, H261, YUV, NUT and so on.
With the AVI to DVD Mac, you can easily convert and burn AVI files to your DVD and play it on portable or home DVD player.