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:
Stumble It!
Dima on Fri, 1st May 2009 8:05 am
I think it’s bullshit. Intranet hosted apps fail too, and much more often than GMail does. Google owns a solid portfolio of geniuses constantly working on all range of issues from security to performance and UI. Saying that all the companies that employ Google Labs products can afford the same quality engineering team and 100% reliability services is bullshit. They will all fail and have downtimes and same economic loses attached, just spread on different days and not simultaneous across many companies, but it’s basically the same thing.
Bill in Detroit on Wed, 25th Nov 2009 9:59 pm
The economic loss calculations are useless at best. Does the Guardian also keep a countdown calendar to 2012?
First of all, many of the affected users were home users. The economic impact there closely approaches zero.
Secondly, precious few businesses use gmail as their primary email carrier. Even little Mom & Pop places will have their own hosted mail server somewhere.
Thirdly, when email is down, the employees should be shifting to other activities … and essentially all of them would. Necessary business communication would be picked up by fax and voice … just like in the bad old days.
Real loss to business? Automated verification of online sales messages were delayed. Ummm, but wait, the sale was already in the bag, so how much damage could there be if the email verifying it was delayed?
And fourth? Ahem … nearly all of that email is spam anyways and would have been a net economic loss to the recipient under the best of circumstances.
Google is NOT infallible, but an hour of lost email is NOT worth $415M. Not, certainly, in the British market (~8 million affected), not even in the US market (do your own research for spam email rates) and possibly not in the world-taken-as-a-whole market because, big as it is, Gmail doesn’t even carry half of the worlds email … it certainly is not a SPOF for the global economy.
This was sensationalist reporting. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.