I’ve written several times about “cloud” availability/reliability. A recent article on Microsoft’s outlook.com service brought this back to my attention. This is Microsoft’s free service so there’s not really a lot of room to complain. This discussion is to compare the cloud solution to a self-hosted solution.
Microsoft has a status page which was getting updated regularly which is good but the details were a little light, e.g. “focused on remediation” and “users may be able to access the service by logging in to their Outlook.com accounts with a web browser as an alternative method”. The problem existed almost a week.
Again this is a free service but these are situations you need to consider as you explore moving a service to the cloud.
Go read some of the comments:
When you go cloud hosted you are subcontracting your responsibility to a third party.
That third party may be much more capable than your IT budget will allow
Cloud is a way to free up the expense of operating your own IT services.
Realize that you are less than a rounding error to the cloud provider.
Clouds by nature are BIG. Big things take a long time to fix. Be prepared for that.