Google's hosted webmail system Gmail suffered a fairly major outage this morning. The BBC reports the GMail service as having been down for about four hours from 09:30 GMT this morning (24th Feb). GMail is part of a suite of online applications from Google that are being adopted by an increasing number of businesses, particularly SMB's.

Google's SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the professional,  paid for, version of GMail is 99.9% uptime in any calendar month. The BBC reports that

..." According to Google, its e-mail service suffered an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month in 2008. The last outage of note was in August 2008 when users were unable to use Google Mail for "a couple of hours"."

So should business users avoid hosted services? I would say probably not, 99.9% uptime isn't unusually bad, most systems will go down at some point so you need to have a contingency plan whatever you do. You need to weigh up the risks. A  problem with taking a service from the likes of Google or Microsoft is that you have no control and very little influence. In the case of a wholesale outage of course Google will pull out all the stops to fix the problem as it would effect millions of users (including Google staff themselves who also use the service - as you would expect!) but if it's just  a problem for you, you could have a struggle, and be aware the 99.9% uptime only applies to GMail.

The other issue I have with most of these services is one of security and privacy. Your confidential data is sitting out there "in the cloud", you don't know where. It will almost certainly be off shore (ie outside UK legal jurisdiction). Furthermore. when using Google apps (their complete suite of business applications)  Google keep track of absolutely everything you are doing. The Google apps privacy notice says...

"..When you use Google Apps, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of the services. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL)."

This is no different to what happens when you use Google normally, but to me your office applications should be a more private space.

So; don't rule out using mass market hosted services, but do expect some downtime, do have a contingency plan, and do make sure your terms and conditions and service level agreements with your customers take account of those of your service providers.

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