Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"

http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their-data-should-ever-go-google/

by e1ven • 15 years ago

197 119 15 years ago

e1ven.com

res0nat0r• 15 years ago

What type of SLA's did you agree to when you signed up for Google Apps?

e1ven10• 15 years ago

That's sort of the point.

It's a big deal to us, not a big deal to them. We'd pay extra for a tighter SLA if that option were available, but as it is, on outage hurts us a LOT, and them not very much.

That would seem to be prescription for bringing it in-house, despite how little I want to do that.

16s• 15 years ago

Find a small local IT company to use. It's been my experience that they are very responsive and do really care and many of them are very high-quality (old Unix guys). Google are just so large and so far away. They can't be everything to everybody (try as they might).

minalecs• 15 years ago

I might of missed it, but are you using Google Apps (free) or Google Apps for business ? http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html

e1ven10• 15 years ago

Business. We pay them $50/user, for quite a few users. Thanks for the clarification, I've edited the top paragraph to make that clearer.

ttyS0• 15 years ago

Yes, because we all know that when we run these systems outselves, they never go down.

e1ven10• 15 years ago

I've done this quite a bit myself, and I know it can certainly go down. But at least then I can do something about it..

As it is, it feels like my requests are going into a blackhole. This is very important to us, but to Google, we're just another tiny startup.

chaosmachine• 15 years ago

When Google breaks, you're basically stuck waiting for them. If your own system breaks, at least you can attempt to fix it.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

When your hosting company goes down, you're basically stuck waiting for them.

The only way to ensure that you never have downtime is to not use the Internet, and keep all your servers connected to a nuclear reactor, all inside a mountain. That covers power and not being flooded or hit by a tornado, anyway.

Even then you'd better be careful not to trip over any of the power cables or type "rm -rf /" as root.

zalew• 15 years ago

in other words: if google goes down, you can do other work meanwhile or go to lunch, if your system goes down, you have to spend your time/money to fix it.

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

Dropbox has an advantage here, in that all files are stored local (mirrored, really) in user's computers, and they are backed up. It doesn't scale to shared editing, though.

I'm turning more and more to plaintext/markdown on Dropbox.

e1ven10• 15 years ago

That's where we've moved all our Shared files. I don't love the pricing models, or the privacy issues, or the security model, so we're looking for something else.

AeroFS is the best off-site solution so far, but it's still very beta.

benjaminfox• 15 years ago

For backing up files that need to be on Google Docs, I use GDocBackup (http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup) and have it download my Google Docs to a Dropbox folder.

roc• 15 years ago

Dropbox-style mirroring is still susceptible to the hypothetical "service problem killed/corrupted a file, the mistake was happily sync'd down to all mirrors."

In short: if you're reliant on the cloud service for your backups (as distinct from your sync'ing), you're at risk.

sdizdar2• 15 years ago

Of course, simplistic mirroring solutions will have these problems. However, the right mirroring solution for syncing information (documents, presentations, etc.), should provide auditing, providence of created documents, and rewind for all actions.

cezary• 15 years ago

Dropbox stores different versions of files so even if files are corrupted/deleted and this change is sync'd up to them, you can still restore your files.

steevdave4• 15 years ago

Why don't people make backups anymore? I know that using Google Apps is much easier than running your own stuff in-house. It requires much less time and resources, but at the same time there are still best practices and disaster recovery plans that should always have something about backups in them. And just having them isn't good enough. They also need to be followed. Having worked at a place without these ( and attempting to get them implemented ) versus where I currently work that has them and follows them, I have to say, there are a lot fewer times where I feel like screaming here. Do it, and stop expecting 100% uptime and availability of all docs/important information from any service, internal or external. Nothing is 100% but there are many ways to make it less stressful.

e1ven10• 15 years ago

That's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops..

But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

Aren't the Google Docs GDATA enabled? [1] If so then it should be pretty straightforward to write a script which would pull down copies of any file that had changed for local backup.

[1] http://code.google.com/googleapps/appsscript/service_docslis...

jgarmon6• 15 years ago

Actually, since SugarSync inaugurated the shameless plug portion of the thread, let it be said that Google Apps is hard to manually backup. That why we automated it at Backupify. http://www.backupify.com

Automatic daily Google Apps backups -- all of it, even Google Sites -- for just $3 per user per month. Unlimited storage. One-click restore for Google Docs and Gmail messages. And we're soon rolling out full-domain search, so you can query all your Gmail, Docs and Calendar accounts simultaneously.

We also backup your Twitter Feed, your Facebook Pages and your Flickr or Picasa photo albums, should the need arise.

Also, for the record, we have a 1-800 number that we actually answer, so in the event you have trouble with our service, we'll pick up the phone and talk you through the fix. We can't repair your Apps account, but we can darn well make sure you get to the data that's in it. We wouldn't charge you, otherwise.

Glide• 15 years ago

One of the system admins here made a comment about how important backups are for a business. He said the only time he ever saw someone get fired immediately was when they screwed up the backup system.

He talked me through all the design considerations they had to do for their backup system for the datacenter here. It's a lot of work, but there is a lot of business value in having a working backup system.

anonymous246• 15 years ago

So your reply about atrocious customer service (i.e., a post about a PAYING customer being unable to get access to his file) is to say "well, you should have backed up"?

The real story here is that a paying customer was unable to get anything better than a free user.

FWIW, I must be lazy or something, but I don't think the user of a VERSIONED online document storage service should be reasonably be expected to also have his/her own backups. What the hell am I paying for then?

steevdave4• 15 years ago

In house or external doesn't matter. You always backup.

Because it seems to be a foreign concept in this day and age, I will repeat it again.

You always backup.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

> The real story here

Why can't there be two stories?

If I park my car and don't lock the doors, and come back to find it gone, is the story that I'm an idiot for leaving a car unlocked, or is the story that the neighborhood is unsafe?

They're both problems, but I can actually solve one of them myself. That doesn't excuse the $BAD_THING that happened, but it does offer me options for when it inevitably does.

sreitshamer• 15 years ago

CloudPull is an app that backs up Google apps data.

sdizdar2• 15 years ago

100% agree. We are developing service which tries to solve some of these problems, so I'll do a shameless plug here.

One way to address these kind of problems is to use cloudHQ to synchronize your Google Docs with SugarSync (clickable: http://cloudHQ.net/sugarsync). (We are releasing dropbox this weekend).

Here is our idea: there are many different cloud storage services and each of them is very good for a particular use case but not so good for other use cases. For example, Google Docs service is excellent for collaboration but not so good for storage. On the other hand, Dropbox or Sugarsync service is excellent for storage but not so for collaboration.

So if data is continuously synchronized between Google Docs and lets say SugarSync storage, then you can always fall back to SugarSync when Google Docs becomes unavailable and vice versa. In order words, you can use other service as a standby site in case of service unavailability, malicious or accidental deletion of files, etc.

edanm4• 15 years ago

That sounds amazing, actually. A service which synced Google Docs documents directly to my Dropbox is definitely something I would be interested in.

gte910h• 15 years ago

I'd love an invite to that service.

kvgr• 15 years ago

Agree, I use backupify.com to backup my FB, Twitter, Gmail and Docs. The thing about unreliable customer service is really bad, but you just can't relly on one company, even Google.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

How do you backup Google Documents? Can any of the popular backup utilities do that for you as part of your whole-company backup plan? That would be pretty cool.

I know you can use pop (and maybe imap) to pull email out of GMail. but can you recommend a product that can handle slurping and backing up all the mail for your domain?

angusgr• 15 years ago

This will apparently do it from the desktop: http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup

You can also do it direct from the web UI. Just select all your documents from the Google Docs homescreen, click on the "Download..." link in the righthand column, and it will ask you what formats you want then generate a zip file to download.

I don't know of a command line script that uses OAuth (GDocsBackup has a command line mode but uses password auth.) Anyone?

ireadzalot• 15 years ago

Cyberduck allows to you bulk download them as well at once.

Estragon• 15 years ago

It's actually pretty easy to take a backup of a Google Apps account. I used to do it in a nightly cron job.

There is probably a business idea here.

jbrayton• 15 years ago

I agree. Using a third party service is reasonable. The important thing is having a backup plan.

Shameless plug: This is why I wrote my app, CloudPull. CloudPull backs up your Google Docs, Calendars, and Contacts to your Mac. If for any reason you are unable to access your Google account, CloudPull ensures that you have backups of your Google data on your Mac.

More information about CloudPull is available at: http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/

Vvector• 15 years ago

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html

Support and reliability

24/7 phone and email support for critical issues

99.9% uptime guarantee SLA

e1ven10• 15 years ago

We have that ;) I called them, emailed them, and asked for updates in as plain of terms as possible.

4+ days on the missing file, 8+ hours on broken email.

VengefulCynic• 15 years ago

Quite simply, Google appears to be in material breach of your SLA. Where is your lawyer?

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

No person or organization should put itself in a position where it depends only on an external source for either security or backups. Whatever else might or might not be "mission critical", I think this inherent is.

Come back and tell me that relying on using Google docs while keeping local backups is problematic or awkward. That would be a fair complaint.

Toshiba isn't going to help me if my drive goes down either. Whether they send a nice or not nice email isn't the point.

gregable2• 15 years ago

This sounds great, but in practice is impossible. Are you personally as an individual going to take care of 100% of your own backups? Are you going to drive the tape over to the other facility that you own, make regular checks that you can restore, etc? No.

Ultimately you are going to rely on someone else and something else. Be it your IT guy, the company that hosts your backups, the power company, the company that makes the machines you keep your backups on, etc. You can distribute this so that you rely on lots of someone else's and any one or more of them can fail, but often you'll still have one point of failure somewhere (the guy who monitors the distributed backups for example).

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

No,

I mean each organization needs to have in-organization backups and each individual needs to back-up their machine.

Yes, my IT guy. I need to have an institutional relation with my backup guy, not just a paying relation. The IT guy could send the data to three different online backup services but me having a personal and institutional relation with him makes sure that whatever scheme he uses will remain reliable as other things change.

The point is that every organization has at least one mission, one task that it is worth doing within the organization rather than offloading to another entity. And backup is always going to be close to that mission.

nolite• 15 years ago

Please stop paying them.. companies seem to only learn through the wallet

slewis2• 15 years ago

So are you actually switching off Google?

e1ven10• 15 years ago

We've moved from Google Docs to Dropbox, at least as a placeholder; We're still trying to find a better long-term solution. AeroFS is leading the pack, once it is out of beta.

For Email, we plan to, but it's a bit more complicated.

I'll need to imapsync each account, so it's going to be messy, so I'll need a week or two to plan it out, and build/test a new Zimbra server.

eduardo_f• 15 years ago

Try http://www.MigrationBox.com if you want to save the messy.

msy• 15 years ago

This is precisely why I think it's insane that people trust their email - the nexus of their online presence, normally the key to every account and their primary communication tool for everything from conversations to account statements to a free service. It's not 1996 anymore, this stuff matters. I pay for Rackspace email. When I have a problem I can call a human and get an answer. As far as I'm concerned it's a bargain.

Google doesn't do human, it doesn't matter if it's a free gmail account, a serious-money adwords account or your entire business on apps, you're just a number if something goes wrong you're on your own, shouting at the unmoving monolith.

ojilles• 15 years ago

So, let's have some stats? I mean, does a paid for provider go down more or less? What about loosing data? I'm not so sure Gmail comes out that bad

gnaffle• 15 years ago

The point isn't so much whether or not Google comes out bad, it's whether you have someone to talk to that can actually fix the problem when something happens.

There are providers that can give you various guarantees, response times and that will make key personnel available to you (at a price). Google is not one of those providers.

sunchild7• 15 years ago

Yeah, and how much of your time is spent going over obvious nonsense with that human on the telephone line?

stevenj• 15 years ago

How much do you pay for your Rackspace email?

dangrossman• 15 years ago

I pay $1 per mailbox per month. The current price is $2 per month per mailbox, still a deal. Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust) is incredibly reliable, backed up daily, good spam filters, and excellent 24/7/365 support. In the past ~3 years I've only experienced a single downtime incident of about 10 minutes.

edanm4• 15 years ago

The op was a paid customer. It apparently didn't matter much.

calloc• 15 years ago

I've got Google Apps for Business, and when all of our mailboxes were unavailable I contacted Google at the number listed on their website, talked to a human, got it resolved in about 30 minutes.

wewyor• 15 years ago

I'm not sure that they followed the support instructions, the email excerpt said to reply if that wasn't the right solution but it just says they sent another support email.

It probably would have been better to call, I mean you are paying for 24/7 phone and email support.

I haven't had any problems with getting support through Google Apps for Business, I might be an exception though.

m0nty• 15 years ago

That's my experience too. Hardly ever goes wrong, telephone support was friendly and on-the-money, problem quickly solved.

mhansen• 15 years ago

This person was a paying customer, and did get human support. From the article:

    We got back several emails explaining that they are very sorry,
    but while they are working on retrieving the file, they can’t 
    promise any dates or times.

It's easy to miss that, as most of the article was a copy-paste of a useless email. Looks like after that, he did get the human support you're talking about.

barista• 15 years ago

Also it's not fair to single out just Google here. SalesForce, Microsoft and many others offer cloud based solutions. Any cloud solution has the risk of them screwing up something in their data center and losing your data. Stay local and in control if the data is so mission critical.

billmcneale2• 15 years ago

You're missing the point. The problem is not that the service is free (especially since as a free service, Google's uptime probably leaves all their competitors in the dust).

The problem is just having your email stored outside your private network.

It makes a lot of sense for startups and small companies, less so when they start growing and they can afford a staff of sysadmins.

sunchild7• 15 years ago

This attitude drives me nuts. Why would anyone want a staff of sysadmins? You're almost certainly buying (at a high capital outlay) the B-team when you can rent the A-team for next to nothing.

There's nothing magical about your "private network". These days corporate networks are chock full of holes and ripe with hypocritical security priorities.

Use Google apps for business ($50/year/user). Hire one of the many companies that archive Google Apps data.

It is total folly to think that you'll buy better security by paying for your own infrastructure and a small army to run it. That's like claiming the only safe automobile is one that you and your friends build.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

It's the application. Gmail is a hosting service for your email, but it's also a fabulous intuitive email webapp. I am sure many companies/people would purchase an internally hosted gmail appliance (heck, maybe a whole google apps appliance), if they could. I think that's one reason that many of us end up in this situation.

slewis2• 15 years ago

Just Googled around and found http://www.backupify.com/ or maybe something like http://www.ltech.com/google-apps/products/google-docs-backup

Has anyone tried those products?

Erwin• 15 years ago

Mixed reviews on the Google Apps marketplace for backupify: https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?pr... -- 27 users take 21 days to backup? Might well be the Google Apps infrastructure that's not up to the task. Looking at my company's Google apps domain, we probably have several million threads and are close to a terabyte of data. I imagine backing that up via IMAP could take a while.

jgarmon6• 15 years ago

Those are fair criticisms of Backupify to date. We've recently totally reworked our throttling mechanisms, to our initial backup times are decreasing rather rapidly. But, to your point, we are at the mercy of how fast Google can give us the data through their API. That said, given Google's general uptime, the likelihood of Google losing a file before we can back it up is pretty remote. Not zero chance, but really unlikely.

simonhamp• 15 years ago

This is precisely the reason why I don't use Google Docs for any mission-critical documents. Store them in Dropbox or some other shared, automatically-backed-up system where you can easily retrieve a copy from somewhere.

Always have redundancy too. We keep most of our files in Dropbox. But we all use Time Machine too. We also use version control for a lot of our work.

This might seem like overkill, but each has a specific use and purpose with the added bonus of providing us with backup redundancy.

lwhi• 15 years ago

I think this is the problem with all cloud services. The liability costs involved in dealing with worst case scenarios are potentially so huge, the majority of providers have terms and conditions which relinquish all responsibility when bad things happen.

The only real solution is backup, and the only backup that can truly be relied upon is one you make yourself; in which case the point in making use of a cloud service in the first place is pretty much reduced.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>We’ve been running flawlessly for 6 months, paying them $50/user to avoid handling it ourselves.

if you open Excel and put some typical numbers into it (like commodity hardware cost, networks, electricity, data center mortgage, basic maintenance employees, 40% margin, etc...) you'd see that $50/user/month is just basic usage - timeslice to run provided software on provided hardware. There is no room in that number for a real person dealing with your specific issue. An elephant can't squeeze into a needle eye, even if he promised it to you in writing and accepted the money - just look at the elephant and at the needle with your own eyes.

jsnell• 15 years ago

You might already know this already and that's just a typo, but the actual price is $50/user/year, not per month.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

if it is per year then it is a real miracle of mass scale production at Google.

schwit• 15 years ago

I would be afraid that in a dispute Google could do a PayPal and lock you out of your data. I would also be concerned that Google would provide law enforcement access to your data without your knowledge, consent or a warrant.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

Personally, I use Google Docs every day, and I back up all of my docs on a regular basis (easy to do). Same with my GMail: use POP3 to keep a backup copy locally.

I would not consider running my own services and not back up my data. If you use GMail and/or Docs for free or as a paid customer, still, why would you not make local backups?

eitally• 15 years ago

In case anyone cares to hear a counterpoint, I run a nearly 20,000 seat Apps domain and the service and transparency we receive from Google is leaps & bounds better than from any vendor of similar size. Perhaps my happiness makes sense given how much we're paying them compared to, say, e1ven's company.

gregable2• 15 years ago

I think a lot of this is not about security or service level. It's psychological, it's about control/trust. When it's under your control and you can fix things yourself, you psychologically feel more safe. If you rely on someone else and they say "we're working on it" but don't give you an estimate, you feel a lack of control. It may be that doing things yourself has worse uptime/performance/etc than relying on someone else, but the psychological effect of that loss of control when something bad happens is huge.

mariusmg• 15 years ago

In another news scientists discovered that water is wet...

atacrawl• 15 years ago

I worked for a company that switched to Google Business a few years ago. The one thing I'll say about the experience is that administering the back end totally sucks.

The UI in a lot of places makes no sense. For instance, there are settings for when you set up an email list that are labeled so obtusely that you're not really sure of what you're selecting.

Another thing that totally bit us once was when dealing with document ownership in Google Docs -- a lady in marketing had created a bunch of documents, then later left the company. After scouring the back end for about an hour (literally), I concluded that there was NO WAY for the admin user to reassign the owner of the document to a different person. I ended up having to log in as that person (luckily we kept people's accounts active for 6-12 months after they left) and switching the owner that way. Totally absurd. (If I'm wrong about that, please do tell.)

As far as customer service goes, it's definitely a minus. They don't make it easy to tell you who to call or email when you do have a problem, and once you get there, the time before your problem is resolved can vary wildly (from hours to days). That really sucks when you have a salesman breathing down your neck because he can't use his email.

powertower• 15 years ago

It gets much worse than this.

A lot of businesses are completely dependent on Google via organic search and AdWords for 90%+ percent of their revenues (without even realizing it).

What happens when you log into your AdWords account and you’re greeted by this cryptic message:

http://www.devside.net/images/adwords-account-suspended.png

Except that you've done nothing wrong, have never been warned, are not a spammer, and are completely legitimate.

What happens is that after contacting Google you soon realize that a monopoly with no customer support is the most dangerous one.

Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"

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