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Light: I notice at least one tech here in Maui decided to set someone up to a google account tied to his own personal google account. That was very bad professionalism.I agree, but this has nothing to do with using Google vs. local hosting. As you rightly point out, he should have provided all relevant account credentials to the customer. They paid for it, and its their property.
Light: I agree that google's services are very stable and many systems can't even shine a light to it. However, they still reserve the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want,and they will have your data.I have to call you on this one. Google business applications, which is what you should be using if you are setting up business email, has a service agreement that states in section 7.1 "Each party will: (a) protect the other party’s Confidential Information with the same standard of care it uses to protect its own Confidential Information." Google is not going to play fast and loose with your business data. If they did this to even one customer, their business application revenue would evaporate and they would open themselves up to litigation.
Light: Also, many companies that have cloud based computing have provisions in their ToS that gives them legal use to any of the data on their servers.You are talking about free consumer focused services. No major business SaaS provider (Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, etc.) has such a provision. If they did, no business would use them.
Light: Not too long ago, a certain VP candidate had her gmail account hacked (not getting political at all here). If someone who has protection from the secret service is vulnerable, you are too.That was due to a weak password on a personal account. It has nothing to do with Google's security. If your password is palin123, no one can help you, not even Google :-)
Light: The one problem with SaaS as I see it is that the Service can be rescinded at any time. If the company folds, there goes your email and all your data and they aren't liable as per their Terms of Service.I think we all accept that there is risk in any strategy, and as you rightly point out, its always good to have backups. The question is, which strategy is the least risky, and how can we mitigate that risk? It is highly unlikely that Google is going to suddenly decide to shut off your email account and erase your data. It is also highly unlikely they are going to suddenly go out of business without you having time to migrate your email and documents. $120B companies don't suddenly disappear without warning. It doesn't make sense to spend large amounts of money planning for these scenarios, especially for a small or medium size businesses. Planning for occasional outages makes sense, but you need to do this for locally hosted systems as well.
Light: For anyone relying on SaaS like Gmail and other cloud based apps, a good backup strategy for sensitive data is highly recommended.A good backup strategy is always recommended, but even more so if you are hosting locally rather than using a well established SaaS provider. Locally hosted systems are almost always less reliable and more prone to security issues.
Light: With the recent failure of Gmail highlighting exactly what the problem is with relying on such a massive system with so many users.No system is perfect. Last I checked, Gmail still had 99.9% uptime. I don't know many local businesses that can make this claim about their internal systems.
Konstantin Lukin: If this society was a huge operating system, we seriously need to re-consider its architectural design, resource utilization and garbage collection... :)
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