Cloud storage Dropbox took a tumble 10 days into the new year. A one-hour outage wasn’t resolved for 15 hours, during which users were unable to sync with the desktop DropBox program and upload to the website.
DropBox’s reported handling of the event has been less than stellar. Five days later it had provided no explanation for the outage and Twitter had produced a hashtag (#Dropboxdown) to catalogue the event.
Businesses may read the news reports and feel the cloud is not yet ready for them. But these highly publicised outages need to be put into perspective.
First the facts. Dropbox provides 100GB of storage for US$100 a year. Files stored by the service are automatically synced with your smartphone, desktop, laptop or tablet seamlessly. It’s dead simple to share a file of any size with one or a group of people.
Now compare this to the storage a business typically uses in house. Most are probably storing files on the hard drive of a local PC, a small file server or network-attached storage (NAS) box. The in-house alternative makes it difficult to share files with many people apart from emailing, with all the restrictions that entails.
Mobile and remote access of files is also not easy, requiring terminal services or VPNs. (Although third-party apps like Logmein now make that much easier.)
The cost of 100GB storage is usually part of the cost of buying the machine, which is at least several hundred dollars and must be replaced every three to five years. Add the cost of electricity, backup drives, desk space and the rest – plus the hassle of maintaining the computer – and the simplicity of a low-cost cloud storage solution like Dropbox becomes highly attractive.
Then there’s the question of uptime. Dropbox is one of the few major cloud providers not to commit to a minimum amount of time it will be accessible. Major outages of DropBox have occurred a handful of times in the past 12 months for no more than a day at most.
Granted, Dropbox still shows its roots as a consumer application. Most enterprises who use cloud storage go to Box, which promises 99.9% uptime. That equates to nine hours of downtime a year or 40 minutes a month.
The reality is that businesses struggle to maintain their computers – updating operating systems, applications, replacing dead hard drives, failed motherboards and the like. If a news report was written every time their PC was out of action they’d fill a weekly newspaper.
Reactions to these occasional cloud outages are often more emotional than rational. The worst of a cloud outage is that a business really has no choice but to wait it out and find a workaround, and the sense of impotence is really what gets them.
At least if your computer crashes you can give it an almighty thump. It does nothing to change the situation but it sure makes you feel better.
Image credit: DesignTickle