Google’s Cloud Issues Should Worry Enterprises

Gmail’s December 10 outage, blamed on a routine update gone wrong, should worry enterprises. In addition to the Gmail glitch, some Chrome browsers were also affected, hurting productivity. As the distinction between native clients and cloud services blurs, enterprises cannot put up with this instability. And now that Google charges for its Google Apps for Business, the stakes have increased and the potential impact of an outage can border beyond being a simple annoyance.

For an estimated 40 minutes, Gmail and Google Drive had scattered outages. Reports showed that Google Apps accounts were less affected than personal Gmail accounts.

In addition, many Chrome users reported experiencing full-on crashes – a serious problem because the crash terminated their internet-based tasks. The Google Chrome crash, in particular, is strange given that Chrome operates like most current browsers. It attempts to sandbox individual tabs. With sandboxed tabs, a bad script loaded from a problematic page results in a tab that fails to load. In short, the user will get a “hang” on the tab and not the entire browser. To get the whole client to crash means trouble.

Although it is not clear, the Gmail and Chrome failures may have been two unrelated cases. The browser issue stemmed from a glitch in the Google Sync service, a feature that lets users sync their bookmarks and preferences across different machines.

Tim Steele, a Chrome developer, wrote that the problems experienced by the back-end Chrome Sync servers were caused by a faulty change in the quota management system’s load-balancing configuration. The faulty change forced the Sync service to “throttle ‘all’ data types, without accounting for the fact that not all client versions support all data types.”

“That change was to a core piece of infrastructure that many services at Google depend on,” Steele wrote. “This means other services may have been affected at the same time, leading to the confounding original title of this bug.”

Steele’s comments hinted at the Sync trouble spreading out to other services such as Gmail and Google Drive. It looked like the Gmail outage did not cause the browser crash.

The issue cleared in about 30 minutes. And not all Chrome browsers were affected because not every Chrome user activated the Sync feature. All in all, it was not a major problem.

But the implications can be alarming, especially to enterprise IT.

A change was introduced into the complex cloud-based software, then it rapidly cascaded right out to users. Plus, that change seemed to ripple to other services, too. Even if Gmail was not part of the issue with the Chrome Sync servers, the issue of browsers crashing was still inherently disturbing.

Cloud services are expected to go down occasionally. But when a natively installed rich client in a user’s machine crashes as well, it thwarts other tasks while it waits for the original service to restart. Usually, an enterprise IT shop extensively tests any software before it sends anything to production. Enterprise procurement and configuration are processes set back months behind the consumer market. These measures prevent the aforementioned scenario from occurring.

Cloud-based technology is here to stay. The benefits of cloud computing are multifaceted and remarkable. But it is important to note the possible security issues surrounding cloud-based apps like Google and Office 365. If Google wants to be taken seriously as an enterprise player, it is imperative that the company test its configuration changes properly before going live. (KOM) Link