When The Clouds Bring The Rain…

2010 has been a year marked with unprecedented hype around cloud computing. It seems like everywhere you turn a new cloud solution finds its way to the market place. But with all this hype should come a moment of pause. Even Gartner’s Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies places Cloud Computing at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. While there is little doubt that cloud computing is here to stay a plague of outages have hit many of the major clouds this year; NetSuite, Intuit, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and twitter. The most recent being Intuit (Read: Intuit Sites Outage Strands Thousands of SMBs).

If your business depends on any combination of these services you have already experienced a mediocre uptime of 99.9%. This translates to 8.76 hours of downtime for the year and we still have 6 months to go! Our clients that have traditional servers deployed or virtualization are experiencing a far greater percentage of uptime and superior end-user experience.

As I said, there’s little doubt that the emergence of cloud computing has changed the face of technology forever but for those are trying to run their business off these new technologies make sure to bring your umbrella as the storm is fast approaching…