But I told you to Look after it for me
Ok the reality of entrusting someone else to look after things for you is slowly sinking in. Even with all the engineering resource at their disposal there still needs to be an allowance made for the Human Factor.
If you’re a gmail user who logs on this morning and doesn’t have any email then you are probably a little frustrated to say the least!!
There have been other recent examples:
Like the Poor guy who lost all his photos
Or the 150,000 people who accidentally had their accounts reset at gmail
If you’re going to go to the cloud you should always allow for the human factor.
Got to love those service level agreements………..we were up 99.999% but………sorry about loosing your data.
PS.
This is the second mail glitch at Gmail in six months. Those of us in the game realize these things can happen. Even to huge companies with almost unlimited budgets to stop it. In this aspect it’s inevitable.
It’s interesting because it’s reminder reality still reigns and moving data somewhere else (in this case the cloud) isn’t magically in any way. Risks don’t disappear and data loss happens. All that changes is who is nominally responsible. I say nominally because if it’s Microsoft who lose your data instead of Google the blame shifts but in either scenario the data lost is still yours actually and you suffer the consequences.
I always think of the loss of control at the customer end. All you can do is ring someone and moan loudly but you have no control of the situation outside of that regardless of the impact on you. When the chips are down your fate is in someone else’s hands.
These are early days in the outsourcing movement but one of the most important issues is going to be how we deal with the reality of, and recovery from, data loss. Maybe it will end up like AV, where I speak to one customer who is moving off brand A to brand B, only then to speak to the next customer who’s doing the direct reverse moving from B to A.
As Stewart suggests above, a service level contract is a start but not enough on it’s own and cold comfort if you data is gone. Providers need to disclose more about how their systems work and recover so customers can make informed choices.
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