The fact that many of us already live in and depend on cloud services isn’t news, but do require more careful consideration and planning, as well as continued adherence to general computing best practices. While this is harder to do in the era of instant access web services for virtually every need, it’s this lack of friction that eliminates the need for more foresight and planning.

Case in point - this weekend’s Gmail outage / data loss. Until this event, we lived in a world where Google was seen as a utility, in the sense of reliability, at least by the majority of users. 

The reality is that the cloud is the future, that much we can’t control. Knowing and understanding the risks, and planning appropriately, are critical considerations, as is the continued re-evaluation of the following key factors:

Performance - while highly connection dependent, you need to ensure that the service’s performance is consistent, especially for file sharing or cloud-based storage services. This is also a factor when considering hosts that offer bandwidth or CPU scaling in terms of provisioning times, failovers, etc.

Stability - fast access and other performance benefits don’t outweigh uptime and other similar considerations. This also extends to feature set consistency, where features or key elements don’t change without proper notification, opt-out options for beta features, etc.

Viability - even the most reliable provider can’t continue to operate in the event its business collapses. Even the mighty Google is susceptible to this, as the businesses of hosting applications and storage aren’t the main revenue generators - advertising still is.

The continued move to cloud-based services for a large segment of the computing population is inevitable. But the planning and vetting that goes into these services, even for individual use, is important, and should be as considered a decision as any major technology platform or software product choice.