by Hovhannes Avoyan
| Oct 01, 2009
Recent Google crashes have put a painful spotlight on vulnerabilities in cloud computing.
On September 24th, Gmail subscribers suffered a two-and-a-half-hour disruption, the second Google outage to occur in days (Google News clocked a two hour downtime days earlier). And it was the latest outage for Gmail in a month’s time (users then were unable to access the service for over an hour due to a router overload).
Later, Google investigated and found that its latest outage was caused by increased traffic levels, and that caused a change to the system code. In a report by Google, the company said it was also hit by higher than normal traffic for its contacts service and suffered other data center issues.
Periscope IT, which manufactures an internet monitoring application, suggests that the problems Google is having could be avoided by using website monitoring services. But whatever is needed, Google’s recent crashes hint at the work that still needs to be done to make cloud computing more secure. Perhaps only then will businesses truly warm up to the idea of exporting data and apps to a virtual platform.
