Cloud or onsite outage – what’s the difference

Friday, January 02, 2009 04:09 Posted by leosaumure

Flight93MushroomCloudIn a recent article on vnunet.com, I read that Salesforce.com had a system outage for approximately forty minutes.  Within the same article, the author made it sound like Saas (software as a service) was not a viable option for business use, rather than onsite computing; quoting a Salesforce.com users:
Salesforce. Don't fail me when I need you the most!
while another user said:
Salesforce crashes, Twitter/Google get hacked, what's next? I am going to switch to landlines and snail mail?
All of this was basically saying to me that it is not possible to trust our data to an outside company, which I think is ridiculous.  How many companies, using traditional computing, have lost days, or weeks of productivity due to system outages?  The company my wife works for, lost an entire day’s worth of external email use and internet coverage, just yesterday due to a virus.  I should point out, that the article doesn’t state if anyone lost data, and as I understand it, data loss wasn’t the issue, it was simply the fact that people couldn’t access the website for a short time.
The fact of the matter is, that computer systems are not perfect, and they can fail, however I would much rather have someone else, someone with much more experience and competence than me, to deal with the problems.  To be honest, I would have been miffed about the service outage if it happened to me, but at least this way, I can join the chorus of cursing their IT guys, rather than having people curse me.

0 Response to "Cloud or onsite outage – what’s the difference"

Post a Comment