Yesterday Google's Gmail was out for two hours or more affecting a number of user both consumer and commercial. September 1st the Google mail service was out as well. Others to hit the cloud outage list this year include Google News, Yahoo mail, PayPal, and Twitter (which seems weekly at times).

These outages can be detrimental for small businesses or individuals waiting for communications regarding revenue. So does this mean the cloud cannot be depended on?

I think this is a telling tale for don't keep all your eggs in one basket. The giant providers of cloud services can be cumbersome and open to more outages based on volume of storage and bandwidth requests. You may be well served to host your mail with Google, but don't host your apps there as well. Spread the coverage of your cloud applications so one outage doesn't black you out.

Redundancy in applications or web services is common, so be sure to have a contingency plan for mail and application services you have hosted on the cloud. What if these cloud providers go bankrupt, or cut back service offerings? Make sure you have a plan in place.

So does this mean cloud computing is not safe? Not at all acceptance may be hurt or curbed by the recent events, but Microsoft will now be moving Office 2010 to the cloud and other traditional standalone applications will soon follow.

I am a fan of the cloud, just make sure you have a plan in place just in case of a little rain falls.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks
Abel