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5th Mar 10
Jonathan Cavell
I saw something in the news from Google today that isn’t getting as much press as it deserves. I think there are two reasons this news is being overlooked. First, it’s an enterprise IT announcement and most Google fans focus exclusively on personal computing innovations out of the software giant. Second, it’s a concept that most people aren’t well versed in. The news is one of those little reminders of how quickly Google is closing the gap in enterprise (large corporation) technology products.
If you’re not familiar with the expression, “The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time” you probably don’t work in Enterprise IT. In the industry we constantly talk about the edible giants as an analogy to large-scale transformation projects. Well, yesterday there was news out of Google that they’ve taken another bite out of the elephant that is being a “serious” enterprise IT vendor. The company announced yesterday morning that all of their Google Apps are now being provided with ZERO downtime disaster recovery. There are not a whole lot of organizations in the world that can offer that kind of service, and none of them at Google’s price ($50 / person / year). For the sake of comparison, this number resembles the amount you would pay in 2 months for a similar bundle of Microsoft applications hosted by a low-price provider.
The improvement to providing disaster recovery is critical. In enterprise IT terms disaster recovery means the ability to recover applications if an entire datacenter (the building where the computers are held) is completely lost, forever. Many organizations back up their data once a day and if they lost their datacenter they would have to build a new one and recover from these backups, a process that would take months. On the other extreme, there are a few organizations that could lose an entire datacenter without any noticeable disruption to their services. Google has published that they intend to fall in the latter category, without increasing their prices.
The reason this improvement is critical to Google’s evolution in to an Enterprise IT Provider is that disaster recovery is traditionally regarded as one of the things that seperates “Enterprise” IT from more makeshift IT. Companies that have redundant datacenters and the ability to “fail-over” without downtime are regarded as “real” enterprises. College kids with a handful of servers in their basements, 10 person companies with a half-time IT guy and even medium sized manufacturing companies that only had a dozen PCs rarely had such capabilities and were not considered real “enterprises”. That all changes with Google’s announcement. It’s one small step along a long road toward the democratization of IT.
