If, like me, you are one of the many millions of internet users who rely on Google's normally wonderful Google Mail service, you may well have been inconvenienced by the recent service outage on Tuesday September 2nd.
In fairness, it was a pretty short total loss of service (just an hour or two for me at least) and only affected webmail-delivered services, rather than third party POP3 and IMAP clients. Google apparently blames it all a maintenance error, which had worldwide consequences, such is the apparent growing demand for Gmail.
So not a major disaster in the great scheme of things. But it wasn't the first such outage this year and it does inevitably raise some serious questions about the integrity of the so-called cloud based internet, which sees data being securely held on distant servers, rather than necessarily being stored on one's own hard drive.
The appeal of cloud internet is somewhat irresistible, the main attractant being that one can access web services on the move and also that a hard drive failure need not be the potentially catastrophic event it might have been in the past - you do back up your important data don't you!
Google's particular vision of the future is that much of the software of everyday life - webmail, document and spreadsheet creation, diaries etc all moves to the cloud. Indeed, this very website is created, edited and stored there!
Which is all fine and dandy, you might think, until a massive worldwide, or even localised, service outage occurs like the one many of us endured earlier this week.
All of a sudden, we are left feeling vulnerable if we are on the move without our laptops and especially if we don't have backups?
So does all this call the viability of The Cloud into question?
I emphatically say no it doesn't.
Remember in the days of dialup and the dawn of broadband when web access would often slow to a crawl? Those teething issues are thankfully long gone for the vast majority of us and, I think, we are seeing the same sort of evolution going on with cloud internet.
It was, after all, the very success of Google Mail that made a short service outage world news. No doubt it cost someone somewhere a loss of business or whatever, but in that the problem was over almost as soon as it had begun suggests that a good recovery programme strategy is already in place.
No doubt Google and all cloud providers are learning fast from these experiences and tweaking their networks so that outages happen less and less in the months and years to come.
As ever, there isn't a perfect solution, but if you ask me if I would ever want to go back to a time when dropping a laptop in a puddle of water or a thief making off with it could at the very least mean the end to an expensive business trip - well I don't need to answer that, do I :-)
Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 6:22PM 
