Google cloud TITSUP

Re: Hmm...

In this case two of everything wouldn't have helped as they lost more than one region. That's bad, very bad. It means anyone looking for reliability can't go with a single supplier if that supplier is Google.

...but they did fix it in roughly an hour, and having spent that much time on hold to C&W for a multi link outage before I wonder how most internal IT teams would have coped.

Re: The Cloud...

That's why I use it. We're a very small company, but we can get a lot of benefits from IT that we're simply not competent to manage ourselves. So our choice is to go with a small local company, and get more cock-ups but more personal service - and we've done that and it was fine. Or a larger company, and get less personal service, but benefit from economies of scale and better uptime, hopefully only one major outage every couple of years.

IT problems land up on my desk, along with my real job, and I know my level of competence - so just keep the laptops and phones running. Everything else gets outsourced - or we do without. Companies like ours couldn't have mobile accessible CRM 10 years ago, and it's worth it - even with the odd problem. So far one 25 minute outage, since we dumped our own server two years ago. And Office 365 hasn't noticeably let us down once. Yet...

Virgin killed our server's network access about 5 times in the last year we had it. The last one for 6 hours. If the office network or power goes down, we can just work from home or use 4G. So we're more resilient than having the server onsite.

Were I running a company large enough to have a decent sized IT department, I'd want the control and ability to manage risk that comes with your own kit. Though even there, I bet there are some things that aren't so critical, and it may be worth some cheap cloud. But you've got to be a pretty big company to be able to afford a backup datacentre with fail-over so that you can theoretically avoid all outages. If you've got the balls to actually test your fail-over system regularly, so that it actually works when needed...