Twitter is ablaze at the moment with people trying to figure out what’s up (or down) with Gmail, what work and what doesn’t and how long it’s going to remain the way. Outages happen, but when you store your entire email history somewhere out on the Internet and suddenly you can’t get access to them; well, people start talking.

The whole problem with this is people start to doubt the effectiveness of Cloud Services. it gets even worse in the corporate space where people need to run their businesses off these systems. And I’m not talking a small outfit trying to perfect the newest diet supplement coming to market; I’m talking about large multinationals who depend on the technology to keep their organisation ticking. Moving towards Cloud Services increases risk and if those risks are managed all can be fine. But an incident like this brings home the impact of a risk you cannot manage.