Cloud Services – Google Outage Sparks Thunder

Dear Colleagues, Leaders, Entrepreneurs, Applications Users, Technophiles, TNNWC Members, Global Futurists, Social Media Addicts, Buzz Baristas (and Amateur Buzzicologist-In-Training) — Google  has just added a thunderous applause (a cloudburst, perhaps) to my last post on the topic of monopolies and dangerous dependencies.

ZDNet had this to say about Google’s most recent and damaging outage:

Google’s Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy

The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly. There’s a lesson here.READ FULL STORY

As an avid trend-spotter, strategic planner and author of the Global Futurist Blog, I will not say “I told you so.”

I will say this, however. The very notion of cloud computing and its inherent economic and logistic advantages (plus the possibility of giving Bill Gates an enormous migraine) has taken a major step backwards, as wary Blogger users are looking for alternative platforms and media to backup their prospective cloud solutions.

My prediction is that this latest catastrophic shutdown, will open a whole new line of inquiry as to the safety and security issues associated with depndence upon cloud solutions and sole-source providers. And while I believe that we will be hustled into cloud-based systems in the future, it is likely that the adaptation of one-stop cloud solutions is going to go even more slowly than I had anticipated. My projected time horizon for the dominance of cloud solutions is now amended to three to five years.

Right now, I would be watching for emerging companies that produce or who are working on developing  backup “cloud support” systems in the event of failures. At the risk of making a bad pun, the more-informed public is beginning to see the thunderheads instead of the pure silver lining.

Also, expect many bloggers to be switching or diversifying blogging platforms because of this mess.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle (http://DouglasCastle1.WordPress.com), as well as at http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com.

There is REASON OUT OF RANDOMNESS.

p.s. It is interesting to compare this with the initial effect on offshore drilling sentiment caused by BP’s “Louisiana Leaker,” or the creation (effective or not) of heightened domestic protection through the chartering, in the US, of The Department of Homeland Security which was precipitated by the 9-11 attacks against the World Trade Center buildings in New York.