Google Outage Shows the Cloud May Not Be Enterprise-Ready

John Spooner, an analyst with Technology Business Research, suggested that Google Apps exists in something of a different context than other cloud-based services.

"It doesn't reflect badly on cloud computing; but it highlights the fears that people have about the move to cloud computing," Spooner said in an interview. "Google doesn't offer a service-level agreement or guarantees for Gmail or [Google Apps]. Whereas if I was a company buying a cloud service, I'd demand an SLA—so it's a little different."

However, that doesn't preclude a more robust version of Google Apps from being used in a wider business context in coming years, although it may be that such an application would be combined with others for maximum efficiency.

"If a company was going to run these things, they'd probably do it on their own private cloud and pull resources that they can access when they need them," Spooner added. "There's probably going to be a mixture of public and internal clouds" in use by future companies, he said.

Whatever the eventual form that the enterprise's cloud-computing future will take, it will probably happen within a private cloud—a more controllable environment than a public cloud hosted by Google or another provider. As Enderle suggested: "With the private cloud, you can assure the quality of the experience; with the public cloud, you can't."