Google service and accountability in The Cloud

Over at The Register, there’s a story, “Gmail users howl over Halloween Outage“. As readers may remember, I discussed in The Scandalous Truth about Clouds that there needs to be significant improvements in the realm of visibility and accountability from Cloud vendors if it is to achieve any form of significant trust.

The fact that there was a Gmail outage for some users wasn’t what caught my attention in this article – it seems that there’s almost always some users who are experiencing problems with Google Mail. What really got my goat was this quote:

Some of the affected users say they’re actually paying to use the service. And one user says that although he represents an organization with a premier account – complete with a phone support option – no one is answering Google’s support line. Indeed, our call to Google’s support line indicates the company does not answer the phone after business hours. But the support does invite you leave a message and provide an account pin number. Google advertises 24/7 phone support for premier accounts, which cost about $50 per user per year.

Do No Evil, huh, Google? What would you call unstaffed 24×7 support line for people who pay for 24×7 support?

It’s time for the cloud hype to be replaced by some cold hard reality checks: big corporates, no matter “how nice” they claim to be, will as a matter of indifference trample on individual end-users time and time again. Cloud is all about big corporates and individual end users. If we don’t get some industry regulation/certification/compliance soon, then as people continue to buy into the cloud hype, we’re going to keep seeing stories of data loss and data unavailability – and the frequency will continue to increase.

Shame Google, shame.