Credit: Mashable
Where were you when the lights went out in Georgia? How about when Princess Diana was killed? Or when Michael Jackson was pronounced dead?
In an unexpected show of the mighty servers, Google inadvertently strengthened its image of world power when an internal software bug shut down Gmail, calendars, Google+, and documents for an hour on Friday Jan. 24, 2014. Where were you and with what Google feature were you engaged?
Life as we knew it was disrupted.
For those among us who didn’t know a mishap was brewing and wanted to share a post, we continued to click and try to get G+ to obey only to see five different shares of the same thing eventually turn up. (That was my experience.)
If Gmail was your primary email, you were screwed just when you were doing the Friday scurry to the weekend. It’s a bit scary, isn’t it, to rely on a behemoth like Google which keeps growing and expanding into new sectors of innovation? Is your business 100 percent dependent on Google for email, social media, calendars and document sharing?
Wake Up Business
Do you remember the days of yore when there was no email. We relied on the phone, fax and snail mail to communicate and instant global engagement was nil.
What we experienced was a first-hand feel for the powerhouse Google has become. I have to think in a boardroom deep in the confines of Google HQ that some executives may be grinning along with the grimace — just a tad.
- Does your company rely strictly on Google for email, calendars, document sharing, analytics, and many other services?
- Do you rent space on Google servers for blogging?
- Maybe you rent space on WordPress.com, Yahoo! or MSN for a website, blog, message board, or other shared-server situation?
Perhaps back in the day, it was easier to just go with what’s “free.” At the risk of your privacy, online security, hacking, and outages you cannot control, among other horrors we’ve yet to experience, your business is subjected to the new whims of the Internet, and you never know what’s coming.
How will you prepare?
