Rich has a blog post touching on the Google Docs outage and he asks if the advantages of such cloud computing apps outweigh the potential disadvantages:...the cost savings of using such services is compelling but when you have a noon deadline today for a million dollar order and you can't access your spreadsheet for 2 hours, are you really saving money?
The Google Docs outage reportedly lasted approximately 45 minutes, but it is indicative of the possibility for longer outages in the future.
The outage also reminds people that when they trust the cloud for all their data, other things can go awry as well. There are security issues, accessibility issues, reliability challenges, etc...
Still the promise of cloud computing is huge, and I believe outages like this one -- while they might scare off some potential new users from signing up this week-- will serve the greater good as the developers go back to the table, figure out what went wrong, and redesign their solutions to prevent future outages (or at least enable faster resumption of services) to the extent possible.
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