Some hours ago Gmail was down and everybody started to complain. Now is up and running and people are still complaining. This made me think that how can business and organizations rely on Gmail for business, if it goes down for around 6 hours as it did today.

Google today provides 99.99% of uptime for Gmail for Business, which translate into approximately of 53 minutes of down time. However this outage wasn’t of an hour, it was more than 6 times the guarantee they offer. This pain the current customer suffer and others don’t wish to suffer, has a partial solution: configure your account of offline use using gears, but still we have the problem of sending. Here is the thing: it is impossible for a service like Gmail to be up 100%, the whole internet and systems are to complicated, there is always a point of failure somewhere. However we could mitigate this points of failure by “not having all our eggs in one basket”, which translates to:

A third party providing a solution (generally in a server hosted by the consumer) that serves as backup for the services. For example company XYZ will host in their server room, a backup of Gmail. So ,if we have the outage we had today, the business can still read and send emails, because it doesn’t fully depend on Gmail. The same principle applies to all services that reside “in the cloud” i.e CRM, Office Suite.

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Now, this is not an easy task: to develop such backup servers, especially when the providers (such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft) don’t have  support for such services through a API. Also, In the case of email, a third party will have to implement a spam filter and SMTP server for the Backup for Business Gmail to work. Then we have the issue of support to the backup and how to seamlessly change the customers from the web based.  And then there is, of how much to see such solution and if a there is actually a demand for such products.

Still, like Travis (a Ausie I met at the Laundry room) said: lack of resources can lead to an opportunity. Right now, we lack the resources to have 100% uptime in our services on the cloud, and the need (or pain) is there, since we now started to depend on them and get outraged when is not fixed at the moment we snap our fingers. The question is: How? Certainly I will love to find out.

Today was like any other day, checking emails and sending emails, reading, browsing watching NBA highlights of the Sunday’s  games.

I was getting prepared to write an email and I needed to recall a address, so I did a respective search in GMAIL, which searches in all your emails (very good by the way). Suddenly I received an error in the screen, which surprised me a lot. Then I tried the search again and the same error. It was like a 705 error and mi request couldn’t be done.

Nothing was working so I closed the browser and then tried to login again, and got this error.

It was half and hour and the error continued, this was around 11:00 am Stockholm time. Then I realized how dependent I was on Webmail and if the service is down, I can’t retrieve any contacts or anything. If I was using a email client like thunderbird or outlook then at least I will have had my access to the contacts, write the email and send it. I will be able to send it because I’m guessing that the problem was on the webmail client, not on the services itself.

Yes GMAIL is BETA, but still we are dependent on companies that offer services for free that become a commodity and that we give for granted. So I’m worried of this trend (which is not getting so much hype this days but.. ) of Software as a Service (SaaS). It may sound paranoiac, but if some day Google out of the blue decides to do something drastic with its services, are we protected? Do we have a backup? Those the agreement we just accept without reading protects us ?