Posted 03/30/09 at 06:14:14 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to Google, if you’ve got valuable documents out on their Google Docs suite of applications, you shouldn’t worry your pretty little head off. According to them, the alleged issues are smoke and mirrors.

In an official blog post by Jonathan Rochelle, Google Docs’ Product Manager, he explains, “At Google, we treat the privacy and integrity of our users' data with the highest priority. We quickly investigated, and we believe that these concerns do not pose a significant security risk to our users. If you want the details, read on...”

The blog post continues to meticulously break down and debunk the issues that the analyst, Ade Barkah, had brought to their attention.

Though, Google did admit that earlier this month a glitch in Docs caused some user documents to be exposed to those without proper permissions. The problem occurred amongst users that had previously shared documents, but reportedly affected less than 0.05 percent of the documents.

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Posted 10/21/08 at 03:08:05 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Last week’s Gmail outage, which lasted for about 28 hours, has once again highlighted a major shortcoming of cloud computing and web-based services. The incidence exemplifies cloud computing skeptics’ greatest concern that unheralded disruptions in cloud computing services might cost businesses’ and individuals dearly.

Some Gmail users – including paying Google Apps subscribers - couldn’t access their accounts between 16 and 17 October. Incensed users expressed their indignation across the internet, while Mark, a Google Apps adviser, provided regular updates on the status of the issue, as long as it lasted.

“We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience,” Mark wrote in a Google Groups post.

Earlier this year, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service remained unavailable for 8 hours. That particular episode had also spawned similar questions regarding cloud computing. Companies will have to come out with ways to keep outages to a negligible count.

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