Google Apps sees 99.9% uptime, proves “cloud reliability”
By Justin Montgomery
Google has extended its 99.9 percent uptime guarantee to all Google Apps products and customers, after proving itself with its GMail users. With more than one million businesses using Google Apps, reliability has finally come into the spotlight.
The Official Google Blog is reporting that the company has extended its service level agreement they offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. Google claims it has already been committed to 99.9 percent uptime for all Google Apps software, so extending the agreement was the final step.
A lot of businesses have put trust in Google to handle their productivity software, and Google isn’t taking that challenge lightly. It also provides an excellent opportunity to prove the reliability and benefits of using a cloud-based service like Google Apps compared to more proprietary offerings like Microsoft Exchange. “Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves,” as stated in a Google blog post. “Higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and ten times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms.”
I made the switch personally to Google Apps from Exchange only a few months ago, and the extreme time and cost savings are worth everything to me. The built-in search and tagging options, the integrated mobile-based features and now a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee make it the most attractive offering by far. To be fair, I do miss the true push nature of Exchange along with the ease of use with Windows Mobile-based devices, but the benefits highly outweigh the negatives. Being that Google itself trusts Google Apps to run its entire operation is cause enough for me.
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on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 10:20 pm
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