Google Apps Downtime: Never Again

It looks like Google Apps is planning to overthrow offline solutions like Microsoft Office with their latest move – Google has just updated their contract concerning Google Apps and it looks like they will have no more downtime from here on out. Any downtime, no matter how small will be counted and applied to the customer’s agreement. Previously Google had scheduled maintenances but it was handled by transferring the work load to another server so the end users won’t experience any interference with their work at all, but this move pretty much ensures that they will never have to. “We believe any instance that causes our users to experience downtime should be avoided – period.” According to Google, Gmail was available to consumers 99.984% of the time – with about 7 minutes of downtime per month. With the no downtime policy, this will make Gmail 46 times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange, which is one of the world’s most widely used email systems. This no-downtime policy will probably make the cloud-based software service the most reliable in the world. How many of you rely on Google Apps for your work?