News Flash: The Cloud Will Go Down
Yesterday, for a few hours Gmail went down. Judging by the reactions on Twitter and in the blogosphere, you’d have thought that the world ended. For work and web-obsessed people who rely on email throughout the day, for a couple of hours it might have felt that way. But when you put yourself at the mercy of a cloud-based computing service, that’s something you have to expect.
No web site has 100% up time — just like almost no computer operates without fail. The same way your personal computer sometimes breaks — denying you access to your email — Gmail and other web-based services will also sometimes break.
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan has a great post that brings up the most obvious point: cloud services can go down, so doesn’t it make sense to keep our data synced offline as well?
“If you’re depending on these Web-based applications you need a backup plan,” writes the always clear-thinking Dignan. Another level-headed ZDNet blogger (these guys are on a roll), my friend Ryan Stewart also hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Systems are going to go down, it’s a fact of life. What’s important is to be prepared when those systems go down which is a major reason that some kind of offline access should be built into systems like email. In theory we’ll reach a time when the cloud really is always on, but we’re not close and it may never happen.”
They’re both advocating something I have been talking about for awhile: desktop access for web apps is very important. The two main reason I gave in my ReadWriteWeb article linked in the previous sentence why we need desktop access for RIAs are that they will help transition mainstream users from desktop to web apps, and because multitasking in the browser is shoddy at best. But to those we can add a third reason: desktop synchronization gives you access to your important data when the cloud goes down — and it will go down.
Dignan wonders if Microsoft might actually be onto something with their software + services vision. Via Microsoft:
The future is a combination of local software and Internet services interacting with one another. Software makes services better and services make software better. And by bringing together the best of both worlds, we maximize choice, flexibility and capabilities for our customers. We describe this evolutionary path in our industry as Software + Services.”
“But to date the effort has been mocked in cloud puritan quarters. It’s not true cloud computing argue these cloud computing puritans. Microsoft is just trying to protect its software dominance (duh) they argue,” says Dignan.
Of course, Microsoft isn’t actually alone in thinking that the software + services is the real future of RIAs. We wrote a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo! also thinks that desktop RIAs are the future. Further, Adobe clearly thinks that desktop/offline access for rich Internet applications is a major part of the future of computing with their AIR software.
Desktop access for RIAs and offline sync of data is a necessary evolutionary step toward that mythical future where the cloud is always on — the one that, as Stewart says, we may never actually reach. For now, relying completely on the cloud is fine only if you’re okay with the fact that your data won’t always be there for you. Keeping your data backed up somewhere else is thus common sense.
So there is one very important lesson to be learned here:
- The cloud will go down, and thus
- Offline/desktop access for RIAs is important.
