Thought for the day: On life when 'The Cloud' starts to rain....

Unless you've been under a rock for the last 12 hours or so you will have seen that the internet is abuzz with comments from people who are devastated that Google's Gmail system was not accessible toady. In fact a BBC news article saying, pretty much, 'Google is down and they're working to sort it out' was the most read article on that august web site this morning.

GET A GRIP PEOPLE!

It's a temporary glitch. The world has NOT come to an end. Life as you know it has NOT changed beyond recognition. It's just a little problem somewhere in Google's vast array of servers and technical gubbins.

Merlin Mann over at the 43 folders website has a great little post that puts it all into perspective. He says "If you can't get into your email why not do something that doesn't need email? Do something a little more productive!"

Sage words of advice, there Merlin. Sage words.....

Of course it does bring up the bigger question relating to 'the cloud'. Everyone, naturally, assumes that Google is so big and so robust that an outage such as this should be darn near impossible. Given that it does happen (And it has happened before - note that the post from Merlin Mann was dated August 2008) what level of confidence can we as consumers have in the proposition that we move a lot of our lives into 'The Cloud" - that nebulous concept of the internet where our stuff disappears and is managed by entities such as Amazon or... Google?

I think this proves that there needs to be more robust business continuity plan in place for when things like this occur. Either that or make sure we follow Merlin's plan and have lots of other things we can when 'The Cloud' starts to spit forth nothing more than rain.

Just a thought

Posted via email from The Posterous Cafe