On Monday, Nick Saber had the harrowing experience of being temporarily locked out of all his Google services. A cryptically simple message saying ” Sorry, your account has been disabled” was the only clue as to why this happened. After sending several emails to customer service, Saber only got a vague automated response. Keep in mind, he’s also a paying customer.
Although Saber eventually got his account re-activated, this shows one of the possible dangers of the increasingly popular cloud computing. For anyone unfamiliar, the premise of “the cloud” is that software will be primarily web based, and data will reside on remote servers, not on local hard drives (think Google Docs, Amazon S3). So what happens if services go down when you need them most?
One solution is to have a local program, offered with a cloud service, to automatically back up chosen data on your local platform. Something that ties in seamlessly with your remote data. Either as a scheduled event, or as an easy option to “save local” when working in a cloud environment. Also, making customer service more human and responsive is key. Being able to get answers and fixes right away from a competent friendly real person, as opposed to sitting in auto respond email – call center hell, would be priceless.
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Google is actually developing a product that addresses this very complaint called Google Gears. It can be set to periodically backup your web-based data to an offline source – it’s already up and running for services like Google Reader if you want to try it out.
http://gears.google.com/
August 6th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
So what happens if services go down when you need them most?
Though, when your own local drive crashes and you need it the most, there is not much you can do but call someone to come and repair it. When Google’s service goes down, you will probably get it fixed in a short while, and not have to pay for repairs.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:29 am