View From Above » Gmail

Microsoft’s Google Cloud FUD Could Come Back to Bite It

Ron Miller — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:03:59 +0000

You have to hand it to Microsoft. Their latest attacks on Google Apps are at least an attempt at comedy, but when you peel back the humor, what you have is just good old-fashioned Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), YouTube style.

I won’t discuss the irony of Microsoft going off on Google services using Google’s own YouTube channel. That’s fairly rich in itself, but as we shall see, Google has opened itself up to these attacks with its own behavior.

Let’s start with the videos. One is a take-off on the 1980s TV series Moonlighting. This is the same company that tried to save flagging Vista sales in 2008 using 90s TV star Jerry Seinfeld. Now they are digging back a little deeper into TV history, so far back most people under 30 probably won’t get it, but they can’t help but get the message. Google is “experimenting” with its customers, while Microsoft is the “safe choice” for business. Blah blah.

In a second video, Microsoft goes after GMail trying to make the case that Google is reading your email and that you can’t conduct business on there because big, bad Google is invading your privacy by basing ads on keywords in the email. It’s worth noting that Google Apps for Business lets businesses hide ads.

It’s all very cute, but at its core, it’s still FUD of the worst kind and takes Microsoft back to the bad old days of trying to take down the opposition by scratching at the itch of doubt many companies still feel toward cloud computing.

Google hasn’t exactly helped itself recently, playing right into the hands of critics and competitors with its privacy policy changes, which generated a huge controversy when they were announced last month. More recently a story surfaced on iPhone Safari user tracking that could lead to government action and lawsuits.

Microsoft is just jumping in and kicking them while they are down and the doubt is simmering in the minds of many users. Just good business, right?

Microsoft even jumped into the fray directly by making the claim that Google was messing with Internet Explorer privacy settings, although Google responded with a firm denial. And the game continues.

But when all is said and done, while Google is hardly an innocent victim in all of this, Microsoft is playing dangerous games by knocking a fellow cloud-computing vendor in this fashion.

That’s because it could be sending the message that the cloud isn’t safe (even if it’s not trying to make that claim), and could be even undermining its own cloud business in the process.

It’s always drag when your own FUD comes back to bite you in the behind, but that could be the case here when Microsoft tries to send a negative cloud message and plays into the fear of cloud doubters — the same people it wants for customers.

GMail Fails LA PD Strict Security Requirements

Ron Miller — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:09:52 +0000

In a move that had to disappoint Google officials, the Los Angeles Police Department rejected GMail as an email option, saying that the system failed to meet federal security guidelines for cloud applications.

According to an LA Times article, city official couldn’t see any way for security and cloud computing to live in harmony:

Google’s system “does not have the technical ability to comply with the city’s security requirements” and that those requirements are “not currently compatible with cloud computing,” the story quotes LA officials.

That had to hurt, especially when Google cites an LA official on its Google Docs for Government web page, and LA has repeatedly been the poster child for Google in terms of the huge cost savings Google Docs and GMail brings to the cash-strapped city — but when it comes to the higher security requirements of the police, it’s apparently not quite enough.

The question becomes if the city’s security requirements are that stringent, is any system really secure enough? As we’ve seen in the last year hacker groups like LulzSec and Anonymous have shown how easy it is to get into law enforcement computer systems.

LulzSec attacked the CIA computers in the middle of June and one week later went after the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. Would these sites have passed the City of Los Angeles guidelines? I would like to think so (although I can’t say for sure), but one thing I can say is that being behind a firewall didn’t seem to help these agencies.

I can understand why LA might want to tread carefully here and make certain that the version of GMail they are getting is secure and passes any guidelines set by the federal government. FierceGovernmentIT reported last year that the General Services Administration adopted GMail at great cost savings to the tax payers, but that the US Army chose to use a cloud email solution developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency. Obviously the two agencies serve very different purposes and had different requirements.

It may be that the general city government goes with the Google solutions and the police decide like the army to find a separate, more secure solution (at least one that seems more secure), but I think officials need to be realistic in terms of what’s possible regarding security at this juncture.

Perhaps no systems exists that will ever be secure enough, and LA officials have to balance budget considerations with security requirements — no easy task, I’m sure.

For now, it leaves Google, and cloud vendors in general, left to once again answer the cloud security question and nobody, least of all Google, can be happy about that outcome.

Google Outage Ultimately Vindicates Cloud Computing

Ron Miller — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:16:55 +0000

Last week, GMail had a serious outage. It was bad for the users affected, no doubt, but in the end it appears no data was lost. The backup systems worked and the system recovered. Yet we still have article after article pointing to the fact that this is precisely why the cloud is risky. I would say, it ultimately proved why the cloud works as designed.

I’m sure it was no fun for the users who logged onto their Gmail accounts last week and found everything gone. I know I would have panicked if it were me, so I’m not minimizing it by any means. But Google did what it needed to do. It found the nature of the problem, it went to its backups and its backups of backups and it recovered the data. As Seth Weintraub wrote on Fortune, tape might be somewhat archaic, but it proved the extent to which Google has gone to protect its data.

The outage appears to have been caused by a bug. As Ben Traynor of Google pointed out, they use tape precisely because it is immune to software bugs. As the old commercial used to say, “The garlic worked.”

But not everyone was convinced that this worked out well in the end. Michael Hickins wrote in a Wall Street Journal article, that this was a black eye for cloud computing in general.

“This is a black eye for companies like Google, which is actively trying to convince businesses and governments to switch their on-premise email systems to online services, which it promotes as less expensive and more reliable.”

I agree to the extent that it plays into the hands of the naysayers and the anti-cloud crowd, but as I’ve asked here before, how many times has your Exchange server gone down in your company? Just because you have an email server behind the firewall doesn’t mean you are immune to problems like the one Google experienced last week during an upgrade.

It was by no means Google’s finest hour, but neither was it an unmitigated disaster because they did what they had to do. In the end, Google recovered the data, and that’s the lesson people should be taking from this incident.

It’s not that Google lost data for a short period of time, it’s that software glitches happen to everyone, even the mighty Google, and we should not be judging them by the fact that they had a problem–because no technology, no matter where it lives is infallible–but by how well they dealt with the problem.

Looking at it from that perspective, we learned that cloud computing works as it should in a crisis situation and Google actually proved the power of the notion.