Google Bashing

[The following article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of the Tech News newsletter.]

Is it the latest craze or an evil plot by Google's detractors? Either way, Google bashing is getting a bit annoying.

Some weeks ago, reports clogged the web telling of continuing Gmail outages and how CEO's couldn't get their email for several hours. But when I researched these reports, I could only find one or two people that were actually affected.

I first wrote about Google's mishaps in an August blog article (Is SaaS Ready for Prime Time?). I've used Gmail practically since its inception and Google Apps for over a year now and have not experienced any significant outages.

My premier Google Apps email service has a 99.9% service level guarantee (Google just extended this guarantee to its other Google Apps services). This is fine since I have a backup email service for sending that "crucial" email if I ever experience an extended Gmail outage.

Not to be trite, but outages happen. However, they usually happen within the confines of the corporate firewall, so we rarely hear about them. After all, who wants to air their dirty laundry on the Internet?

Yet when Google's services fail somewhere in the world, the media and bloggers first reaction is to castigate Google for its catastrophic performance. What ever happened to that old phrase "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?"

The reality is, unless your organization can provide and support all of its own IT services (WAN, ISP, etc.), you will need to rely on third party providers for these services. And, these services will fail at some point.

Our responsibility as IT service managers is to ensure we have sound, actionable SLAs with our service providers that set expectations for handling outages. We should also to establish multiple fail-safe systems for critical services.

These methods will let us improve on the "triple nines" service provider guarantees. Realistically, there are very few service providers that can do better than 99.9%, and some do far worse.

I firmly believe Google is making a significant contribution to the future of online IT services. Let's give them a break so they can help the rest of us get our jobs done!

By Harry Hiles, HBH Technology LLC — 29 Nov 2008