At FireLogic, we got behind Google Apps from early on for many reasons. A guaranteed uptime of 99.9% was just one of them. It’s no secret that our own company backend is hosted on Google Apps, and we have been training others on the product for a while now. But when customers ask about the supposed claim on the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9% guaranteed uptime, it was difficult to point them to hard numbers – until now.
A recent ZDNet news story highlights how Google has publicly proven their claims on the stability of Google Apps as a whole, claiming a 99.984% uptime for the entire Apps ecosystem (personal & business variants) for 2010. That’s excellent news for everyone, because no matter how much faith we have in the product as a company, numbers just don’t lie. And Google’s statistics back up the claim that it can host a truly stable product that rarely goes down when customers need it most.
We have been investigating the stability and viability of Microsoft’s competing product, Office 365, and how it stacks up to Google Apps. The same article referenced above goes on to say that Microsoft is under investigation for it’s 99.9% SLA claims by the UK government due to the rash of recent outages that have been piling up under Microsoft’s watch. In light of this recent news, we just can’t put our weight behind recommending Office 365 to customers at this point.
Office 365 is Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps, and provides businesses and organizations with cloud-hosted email, calendar, contacts, and much of the traditional Office suite within a web browser. The multi-option subscription offering from Microsoft replaced the trouble-laden BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) that was its predecessor which had numerous problems with uptime and stability.
Hopefully Microsoft will be able to pick up the slack and bring Office 365 on track so that we have a true competitor to the solid Google Apps product. FireLogic will continue to keep its eye on the developments surrounding both products as the year goes on.
If you are interested in Google Apps services, feel free to contact us using the menu at the top of this page.
