Google Apps Partner Pokes At Office 365 Cloud Reliability
When Exchange Online — part of Microsoft Office 365 — apparently suffered a three-hour outage in the APAC (Asia Pacific) region on March 15, barely anyone in the North America media noticed. But Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, used the outage as an opportunity to compare and contrast cloud track records at Google and Microsoft.
Generally speaking, Talkin’ Cloud believes Microsoft’s SaaS platform has gotten more reliable since Office 365 succeeded BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) in June 2011. And as Tony Redmond from Windows IT Pro recently noted, Office 365 has enjoyed six months of solid cloud delivery. But Office 365 has suffered from a few outages since its launch, and sister platform Windows Azure had a high-profile Leap Year outage in February 2012. Now, along comes the Exchange Online cloud hiccup in APAC.
I don’t know if Google Apps beats Office 365 in terms of reliability. But generally speaking, I think Google beats Microsoft in terms of cloud transparency — thanks to the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Google, Rackspace and other major cloud providers do an excellent job publishing the current status of their cloud services. In stark contrast, I believe Microsoft makes partners and customers login to a private site to check for status updates.
No doubt, Microsoft publishes blog posts that do a good job — and often, an excellent job — describing occasional cloud hiccups. But Microsoft will need to take some more steps, such as adding phone support, to over-communicate with small business Office 365 customers when a service outage occurs.
Otherwise, Google Apps partners will continue to poke and prod at Office 365 each time the Microsoft cloud suite suffers a hiccup.
