Recently Google Drive had a problem where a lot of users lost a lot of data, and they had to resort to using very old snapshots of the data to recover the missing files. Because of this, users on Twitter (see the replies) and other places want to not use the cloud at all. Now, I get that sh*tting on Google and the cloud for this is fun and all, but there is a big difference between Google Drive and GCP (or Azure, AWS, etc), and we all (everyone in IT at least) know it.
That big difference is that if this were to happen to GCP (or Azure, or AWS), then there would be a big difference to what happened in Google Drive. There would be a financial SLA in place where the provider (Google in this case) would owe every one of their client’s money for the data loss (never mind the fact that you could tell GCP to back up the data in multiple regions, etc). On top of that, there would be configuration options to enable disaster recovery of the data in the storage account. These sorts of options just aren’t available for a consumer-level service such as Google Drive.
I’m all for talking about actual reasons to not go to the cloud, but I have a feeling that this reason will come up a lot in the next few months and it’ll be yet another reason that some companies won’t want to talk about the cloud, and it ends up being a pretty bad reason.
Denny
