Gmail outage underscores Google's trust problem

Back in August, when Google's Gmail experienced three big outages in a row, administrators that depend on the service were quickly rethinking their strategy. Since the service was hosted, they had no recourse but to sit and wait for Google to fix it, leaving them wide open to huge criticisms from not only front-line employees, but CEOs as well. Google had a big PR problem on its hands at the time, but its response seemed on target. The company vowed to address outages better in the future, improving its problem notification methods as well as reimbursing affected paying customers (those who use Apps Premier). Well, that was then and this is now. Gmail was once again hit with a prolonged outage this week, but affected organizations saw little improvement in Google's response.

According to one angry admin posting to Google's Apps Discussion Group at around 9:30 am Thursday, Google had yet to improve its problem notification mechanisms. In fact, he seemed to just be receiving non-answers during his 17-hour outage:

"Since yesterday around at least 4:00pm my CEO cannot access his mail. He gets a 502 temporary error. Support keeps telling me it is affecting a small number of users. This is not a temporary problem if it lasts this long. It is frustrating to not be able to expedite these issues."

While that admin probably wasn't a paying Premier customer, Google's non-response goes a long way to turning enterprises away from cloud computing. Hosted apps are all about trust. Just like with onsite IT services, organizations need to be reassured that their mission-critical data is in good hands, and that when inevitable outages happen, they're properly communicated and quickly resolved. When Google made its customer service promises back in August, it seemed to signal that it understood that trust equation. Unfortunately, this outage and its response shows that Google has a long way to go before it can say it's truly enterprise-savvy.

• Outsourcing
• Apps Premier
• Customer Service
• Gmail
• Google
• outage
• problem notification
• trust