Cloud Computing: Gmail outage – CIOs must be prepared for the unexpected

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Cliff Saran.

The recent outage of Google’s Gmail service shows that even class-leading cloud services can and will fail. How can IT departments build in resilience to cloud computing failures? Google has been winning business over Microsoft by targeting the huge costs associated with running on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers. Analyst Forrester’s Forrsights Hardware Survey; North American and Europe showed that cloud adoption between 2009 to 2012 increased from 9% to 46%.

The growth in cloud adoption is set to rise as CIOs move more of their traditional IT spending away from capital expenditure to software as a service in the cloud, paid per-user as an annual or monthly subscription. As cloud adoption increases more IT departments will need to have a battle plan in place for a cloud service outages…

Resilient but fragile

Cloud-based services, especially those with the global scale of Gmail, are seen as almost 100% reliable in terms of resilience. In fact, the streamlined operational efficiency required to run public cloud services means they can offer extremely high levels of availability for an enterprise at a fraction of the cost required by a CIO to run a traditional datacentre…

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