Is Rain Forecasted for Microsoft's Cloud Computing Future?
On Thursday May 12, a storm hit Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) that left it ravaged and failing, customers had 3 days of no email, over the course of several days updates to the dashboard and other parts of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) failed to communicate with paying customers what was going on, how to work around, through or under it until two days into the fiasco.
Over the years in their lofty position of Only Operating System provider they have obtained a rather cavalier attitude about the problems and or failures that paying clients have experienced, communication with customers or lack thereof being one of the largest; complaints for this incident that some say actually began in January fill customer forums and blogs. Clients of their SAAS services are restlessly mumbling and complaining that maybe in-house supported system are not as cost inhibiting, and added to the fiasco of Amazon a few weeks ago some companies did indeed crank up their in-house Exchange servers and go back to business as usual.
Some apologies, a couple of mea culpa and corporate Vice President of Microsoft Online Services promising vehemently on the Team Blog that communications with the customers will improve to be more extensive and timely, there were attempts made in his posting to separate BPOS from Office 365 saying problems with PBOS were not affecting Office 365 however if you look closely Office 365 is wearing the same clothes as the PBOS.
The standard operating procedures for in-house management of services is to provide a redundancy and the same should be a standard for Cloud Computing, this gap is as some say the immaturity of the cloud vendor but not the technology, and sadly if this were any other vendor but Microsoft maybe companies would think twice about depending on BPOS solely for something so critical as email and other functionality and a failure to plan. What has happened to SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for resolutions and recovery?
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