When Google Goes Down, The Web Panics – What This Means to Cloud Computing

Well, that could be a very strong statement, I agree. But we can’t deny how we are very dependent on Google and all it’s services.

You know, Blogger, where this blog, along with other blogs, is hosted on; Feedburner, which ensures that our readers get fed; Picasa, where all the images in our blogs are hosted; Gmail, which gets the mails delivered and received; Google News, for our daily read; and of course, the one and only Google Search.

So, it does not come as a surprise that Google became quite a bit of a sensation in the micro-blogging platform Twitter when it suffered a failure last May 14 in the morning EST. I do not know if the cause of failure is already publicized by the time this post is published but at the time this is being written, there is no clear explanation yet.

There are rumors that Google security was compromised. I have not confirmed this. But if it were true, then it is very troubling. It is something we need to consider very closely before we can even attempt to take computing up into the cloud. I already mentioned this in a previous post that security is a major consideration in cloud computing.

Even if it were not true, and that it was just a reliability problem, it is still something to consider in cloud computing. As long as it’s down, it’s down regardless of the cause.

If this can happen to the mighty Google, it could happen to anybody including vendors of cloud computing. If it does and cloud computing goes down, your business might go down with it.