Another cautionary tale from the cloud. Last Sunday afternoon Google accidentally deleted the Gmail folders of tens of thousands of users. Contact lists were mostly intact, but for most victims, years of saved correspondence was wiped out. Thankfully, they managed to restore most of the deleted mailboxes within a couple days. But imagine if your business correspondence was lost in the blink of an eye. Imagine if that happened and you didn’t even have a phone number to call to ask why, when, and how. Yikes. Read more…
Caveat Emptor
If you haven’t heard yet … scores of businesses have been paying the price for trail-blazing early adoption with Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Over the past 2 weeks there have been 3 system outages that prevented BPOS customers from accessing email, SharePoint, and web conferencing. And while Microsoft gave a rebate to some affected customers, and they offered an apology on one of their blogs late last week … I suspect they have done damage to their reputation as an enterprise cloud provider. What is worse, they illustrate an all-too-common cautionary tale in our industry; the perils of early adoption.
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I have to admit some growing frustration with a few web-based apps I’ve been using lately. My position on this is not new; I have always expressed my concerns about web-based apps. Lately I’ve diverted some clients away from the idea of using this kind of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) for business-critical applications. The risks still seem too great for the kinds of clients we look after; service outages, security worries, over-busy servers etc… I don’t think this SaaS technology has demonstrated the requisite maturity for medium and large businesses who operate with numerous users running various business apps daily.
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Just a quick piece of advice. We use Google Alerts (amoung other utilities) to keep an eye on what Google returns for specific searches. It’s a nice hands-off way to monitor your organization’s web presence. The way it works is this: Google Alerts does a defined Google search daily and just emails you the results. For example, I like to get a daily report from Google for “IT Weapons” … in case we land in the news somewhere online. So, we have had hits from the Hockey Rink in an Office, Profit 100, Branham 300, Top 100 VAR, and CDN Awards. Most recently we have had news hits for our 10th Anniversary (see the hit below from today). We also use Google alerts for various search strings related to Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Data Centre, Managed Services and more… Another free e-service that delivers great value. Thanks Google.
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Google wants to do hosted apps now. Interesting. Google Apps was actually soft launched 2 years ago and they have been using it internally since. You might ask “what does Microsoft have to say about that?” Well, they have launched BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite). In short, they are very similar products … but basically, clients would run their applications over the internet via a browser. Welcome to the new Google/Microsoft battlefield: Cloud-based Apps.
I find this all very exciting, although … in principle … it’s not entirely new. Delivering applications across the Internet is something IT Weapons has been doing for over 10 years. I first did this myself way back when I qualified as a ‘geek’ in 1992. As a matter of IT-history, I did Canada’s first Citrix WinView installation (yep, I’m THAT old). Anyway, having focused my own career (nearly 20 years) and my company on app-delivery for clients, I qualify as an expert on the topic. Read more…
