Forecast says Sunny, but Cloud Computing may see Stormy Skies!

Many predicted that some day the “Network will become the Computer” – and the IT giants of Microsoft, Amazon and Google are investing millions to tell you that time is now! The “remote” computing revolution in its simplest form means that PCs will eventually become antiques and all of our files, documents and classified information will eventually be stored literally online.

While weather forecasts aren’t always reliable, the digerati have come to depend on the services of the venerable top global search engine known as Google. So when its system fails, which it has been known to do of recent date, our collective confidence is shaken.

Most recently on February 24, when Google’s email system GMail ran out of juice, alarms went off throughout all of Cloud-ville. British users were the first to report that the system was down, and tests in New York at 7:30 AM EST revealed intermittent service where many users were unable to send or receive emails. Mobile Gmail service appeared to be down until about 8:45 AM EST.

Google did respond quickly with a posted apology: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users,” Google said in an advisory on its Gmail support site. “We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.”

As we have come to expect, this news sent the twitterati into overdrive, with European critics labeling the incident another case of “Gfail!” A Dutchman with the Twitter handle of mmarjolein reminded us of Google’s monopolistic control by tweeting: “Dependence is a bitch.” 

A subsequent update appeared 3 hours later, when Google ultimately resolved the problem: “Many of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail today.  The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”

The impact of such an event affects a multitude of users. According to comScore, Google is the world’s third most popular web mail service just slightly behind Hotmail’s 283 million and Yahoo’s 274 million e-mail users.

This is not the only time Google caused panic. On January 31, 2009, Google also caused the Internet world to stand still for a whole 40 minutes! At that time, Google’s core service came to a halt. If one was to conduct a Google search, the warning message “This Site May Harm Your Computer” appeared persuasively underneath each and every search, leaving millions of surfers stranded in cyberspace.

Initially, the “malware” warning made searchers fear that the entire Internet was infected – because, after all, doesn’t Google actually control the entire Internet?  Subsequent reports indicated that Google’s security messaging experienced a major melt down and was being repaired.

Once again the Twitterverse went abuzz alerting fellow twitterers of the mayhem with tweets that included the hashtag #googmayharm. As the micro-bloggers fired off moment-to-moment and play-by-play updates, 1000s of tweets flooded the system! One blogger said the glitch showed the dangers of having the majority of Internet users in the world relying on the Google monoculture for searches. Another, one BradBrownDotCom, joked: “The Google outage frightened me like a schoolgirl, until I remembered an old technology called ‘Yahoo’.”  

So what is Cloud Computing, and how unreliable is it?

Cloud computing is an emerging technology available to e-commerce and other site owners who don’t have the time or resources to handle an information technology infrastructure. Cloud computing allows merchants to buy computing services and pay for them as they need them. Merchants can store images, content and data in the cloud for very low cost and serve it directly out of the cloud without developing their own internal mainframe.

Cloud users don’t pay for overhead or services they are not using. So, when demand is high, they pay for more services and when the demand decreases, they pay for less. The flexibility of cloud computing can be particularly appealing for e-commerce companies that experience seasonal shifts in sales activity. More and more companies that don’t have the time to deal with IT issues look to cloud computing for the majority of their data storage and retrieval.

What does Google’s cloud look like?

It’s a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, inexpensive servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This is the engine that propels searches faster, helping to ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google’s system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living eco-system organism.

Temporary failures like Google’s highlight the risks and challenges for IT decision-makers considering cloud computing. During this outage, while an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google’s new offline mode, introduced last month, the balance of Google service users were forced to just wait in a stalled position or use an alternate email service.

Liability for Google?

Criticism is building and many users are questioning whether glitches that affect so many will damage Google’s reputation. Given their generally unshakable reliability, it’s hard to imagine that these two incidents won’t have some detrimental effect on our confidence in Google’s dominance in the search world. Particularly, considering the amount of potential business that may have been lost by business travelers that rely heavily on Gmail, when traveling.

While Cloud Computing is the wave of future, Google lovers who entertain fantasies of a world without desktop PCs may have their heads in the clouds. Yes, many people will run Google apps that access cloud-based data, but dependency is the issue we will we will continue to rant about when the systems fail. During the short term, while this new technology is attempting to perfect itself, storing your data on the Internet is risky business, particularly when the forecast is indicating cloudy, overcast and no Gmail!

Gmail collapses in the UK

Google’s much vaunted email service Gmail was unavailable today for an estimated 33% of its UK account holders, causing what can only be described as chaos for hundreds of users.  Whilst to many of us the result was a mere inconvenience there has been a backlash by leading IT mangers at the idea of cloud computing and the feasibility of such services in the business environment without total infallibility.  Cloud computing, touted by Google as the future of business and personal computing, allows users to shift the burden of computing power out of the square boxes that now clutter every home and work desk and onto a virtual computer existing online in the electronic ether.  Gmail is the first in a series of developments by Google designed to shift the power away from software manufactures and open up the market to a host of new and exciting applications.   Google already offers a number of business applications with its Google Apps service and wants to convince both big and small business that it represents the future of IT solutions.  Today’s outage for users of its email service is going to come as a serious blow to that attempt.

More worrying, according to Peter Thomas, former head of IT at Chubb Insurance, is the way in which Google responded to the outage.  Google had reacted to the emergency with a message that suggested users try again in 30 seconds, and as Peter said, “Posting other information would have been a good idea.”  Peter also questions the redundancy capacity built into the network which was so badly compromised for such a long time.  Indeed it is going to send a shudder down the neck of any IT manager who has been praising the virtues of cloud applications to senior management.  The problem was fixed in a few hours but the reason for the break in service has not been given.  In a statement on the Google blog, head of Gmail reliability Acacio Cruz apologized and reiterated that Google takes reliability very seriously.  They may do that, but the service break points to the fundamental weakness of online applications; they are vulnerable because of their size and accessibility, the very features which are supposed to make them appealing as the future of business and personal applications.  How damaging the outage will be depends very much on the causes of the problem. If the mighty Google has been hacked then it is nothing short of devastating for the cloud revolution they promise to bring.  If it is a systemic problem then there needs to be a serious review of the redundancy built into the system, and an even more serious review of the communication lines between Google and its users.

To judge the scope of the potential costs to the  business community, the Guardian estimated the following:

“Let’s count the cost: 25m users, 33% affected; average of $50 per hour lost productivity = $415m per hour economic cost…”

Which is no small change in any one’s language.  Is this incident going to change the way in which IT managers see the idea of cloud computing, and is it going to put Google into spin overdrive as it attempts to play down the seriousness of the system failure?  The next few days are going to be crucial to the future of cloud computing and Google needs to address many problems both systemic and public-relation oriented.

Can these sorts of applications ever be made infallible, and how much redundancy do you need to build into the system to make sure that business are going to feel safe in storing information entirely online?  The answer is unquantifiable, and as Google have traded publicly on being the guardians of our online data, what will this mean for the company?  The stock price may crash if there has been a security issue and the service has been hacked.  As we know from painful lessons in history no system is secure when faced with ever more determined and resourceful hackers.  No system ever will be either and this fundamentally challenges the viability of Google’s ambitions in cloud computing.  There are developments ahead in years to come that may provide solutions to these problems, such as privileged networks and ever more sophisticated security applications, but it seems for the meantime that even the clouds are just one step ahead of the hackers determined to gain the ultimate recognition of being the one to topple Googles record on security.

For more information on cloud computing see this excellent video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q[/youtube]