[LINK] Clouded Vision

[Scott Howard]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Richard Chirgwin <rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au
> wrote:

> place to store data than the local hard drive; but for a bank to sign up
> for a
> service which says "give us your data and we won't promise availability" is
> really stupid.


What "data" is the bank giving Google?

They are simply using a web tracking service - something almost every major
website on the internet will use, with many (most?) of them being outsourced
to the likes of Google Analytics.

In this case it sounds like the bank in question had a poorly designed
website which didn't allow for the fact that one component of the page may
not load in a reasonable time (if at all). Many websites now draw content
from multiple sources - well written ones will handle the fact that one or
more particular inputs may be down - you can't blame Google for that fact
that this bank's website didn't!


At the end of the day, cloud service outages like this are just like an
airplane crash - they are big news and impact lots of people, but that
doesn't mean that flying is less safe than driving. How many corporates
suffer an outage to their mail server on a daily basis? How many of those
make the news?

  Scott.