Info 202 Fall 2011

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/office-365-google-docs-go-d...

The link above goes into detail regarding several problems which have occurred
recently amongst cloud computing services.  The services specifically
mentioned were Office 365 and Google Docs.

The author of the article considered these outages as a potential road block
for further cloud computing investing.  While there is clearly a
differentiation between the smaller companies and large corporations capable of
running their own servers, continued outages throughout these service providers
may spurn greater numbers to consider establishing their own servers as a means
of protection from outages.

The outages are a challenge because they strike at the core concept of cloud
computing which is that the physical location and control of the servers is
irrelevant to amassing necessary computing power to organize and retrieve
data. 

The author of the linked article interviewed a small business owner who
continues to use cloud computing services offered by Microsoft.  When
asked whether he would consider switching to in-house servers, he responded
that, he "...[had] been reevaluating it. The outage does concern me but
I’m hopeful it will improve over time.”

For now it appears that optimism will continue to keep users in the cloud, but
as the number of users grow, such outages and disruptions could have serious
and far reaching consequences.  If an individual business' servers are
offline, that causes problems in the economy, but if 20% of the Fortune 500
companies found themselves without the necessary access to information and
services, the results could be far more costly.