Or to be precise, some users are reporting issues with some Google services. As a Google Apps for Business user, I rely on these services. Personally, I can access my email via Gmail and my Nexus devices (Nexii?) but had problems for a while accessing Google Drive. That’s back up now, but some people are having problems accessing their email with IMAP.
You can keep up-to-date at http://www.google.com/appsstatus – although it did take a while for them to report the initial problem – which left a little to be desired – maybe their access was down!?
Unsurprisingly, the usual chorus of naysayers were vocal on twitter and no doubt the blogs will be full of comments about how this all proves how terrible an idea the cloud is.
Actually, it just reinforces my faith in using the cloud, and Google Apps in particular.
You see, I’ve worked in big companies that host their own email servers. And I’ve seen what happens when a server crashes. One or two people get very stressed trying to sort it out. A simple outage was rarely shorter than an hour, something significant, like a big hardware failure – a day or two. You might have to wait for parts to arrive or a particular kind of engineer.
That was big companies. Since then I’ve seen small companies be without their email for days, because of a power failure over Christmas or because they found out the backup wasn’t working.
Now I’m powerless to help fix the problem. But I know there is a big team of experts at Google Apps, with probably more resources than any other company, working on that problem. And they are there 24x7x52. A level of service I could never offer my customers.
So I can assure some concerned clients it’s not just them, go and put the kettle on and know that people far cleverer than me are going to have Google Apps fixed very soon.
Tea, anyone?
A Microsoft Certified Professional with many years of large corporate experience and training, he now focuses on helping small businesses make the most of their IT.
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