I was very interested to hear from James Lappin’s recent conference report that the University of Westminster has not only outsourced its student email to Google, but its staff email too.
When we were putting the briefing paper together providing guidance for those institutions considering outsourcing their email towards the end of last year all of the examples we could find seemed to be limiting the scope of their projects to student email only – the belief being that doing the same for staff email opened up just too many legal and practical cans of worms. Though I must admit that even back then I was pretty sure that it would only be a matter of time before this changed (even if this was as part of a deliberate 'devils advocate' role – and so it has proved.
I’m sure many other institutions and organisations are going through a similar thought process at the moment – hence our interest here at JISC infoNet in seeking to provide some guidance in this area (as members of the records-management-uk@jiscmail.ac.uk list will be aware). As this development indicates, the challenge will be to provide guidance that is both comprehensive and definitive, but at the same time flexible enough to keep pace with the rapid rate of change. I’ll be discussing this and related challenges with colleagues later this month as we start to plan our approach.
Showing posts with label cloud computing computer world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud computing computer world. Show all posts
Friday, 3 April 2009
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
What happens when there are no 'clouds' in sight?
Its all very well outsourcing your mission critical applications to 3rd party providers, but what happens if they prove to be less reliable than expected?
The recent outage of Gmail for 24 hours seems to have reminded many IT managers of some of the potential downsides of cloud computing and of no longer being a master of their own domain (literally!).
"a major concern and objection to SaaS applications is their performance and availability, since they're provided by the vendor via the Internet and accessed by end users through browsers. When the applications become slow or altogether unavailable because of problems in the vendors' data centers, IT administrators have little to do but sit and wait for the problem to be fixed. This often creates extremely stressful and tense situations for them if the outages are prolonged and their end users become angry."
More details of this incident and the problems caused are available from Computerworld
The recent outage of Gmail for 24 hours seems to have reminded many IT managers of some of the potential downsides of cloud computing and of no longer being a master of their own domain (literally!).
"a major concern and objection to SaaS applications is their performance and availability, since they're provided by the vendor via the Internet and accessed by end users through browsers. When the applications become slow or altogether unavailable because of problems in the vendors' data centers, IT administrators have little to do but sit and wait for the problem to be fixed. This often creates extremely stressful and tense situations for them if the outages are prolonged and their end users become angry."
More details of this incident and the problems caused are available from Computerworld
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