Rumbling Clouds

I've written several times about "cloud" availability/reliability. A recent article on Microsoft's outlook.com service brought this back to my attention. This is Microsoft's free service so there's not really a lot of room to complain. This discussion is to compare the cloud solution to a self-hosted solution.

Microsoft has a status page which was getting updated regularly which is good but the details were a little light, e.g. "focused on remediation" and "users may be able to access the service by logging in to their Outlook.com accounts with a web browser as an alternative method". The problem existed almost a week.

Again this is a free service but these are situations you need to consider as you explore moving a service to the cloud.

Go read some of the comments:

When you go cloud hosted you are subcontracting your responsibility to a third party.

That third party may be much more capable than your IT budget will allow

I've got better reliability and almost the same service and functions as my company OWA account, free of charge as well.

Cloud is a way to free up the expense of operating your own IT services.

But putting your eggs into the hands of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or any other single entity to which you represent 0.00000000001% of their annual income is a stupid idea.

Realize that you are less than a rounding error to the cloud provider.

I don't hear many people talk about ... the time it takes to repair a massive amount of infrastructure even when know how and have a fix available. I expect this to only get worse as the cloud continues to grow.

Clouds by nature are BIG. Big things take a long time to fix. Be prepared for that.