Yesterday, Google announced that they have significantly reduced the Gmail downtime, setting a standard for public cloud services. Gmail was up 99.984 percent of time which means seven minutes of downtime per month over last year. In fact, this includes accumulation of small delays of few seconds which some of the users experienced and most of Gmail users didn’t even experience this downtime. However, it is a different story with on-premise email systems. According to Radicati Group, on-premise email had on an average 3.8 hours of downtime per month, making Gmail 32 times more reliable than the average email system and 46 times more than Microsoft Exchange on-premise.

Actually, Google is so confident of their architecture and its reliability that they are taking off the terms related to scheduled maintenance downtime that were earlier part of their SLA. This ensures that any Gmail downtime is counted as an unscheduled downtime, thereby, allowing the users to claim compensation under the SLA. Their confidence can also be seen from the fact that they have removed the 10 minute limit on the intermittent outages. Essentially, Google is saying that any Gmail outage is their mistake and they are willing to compensate their paid customers for it. Whether the compensation is comparable to any loss experienced by their customers is an altogether different debate with many nuances to be considered. It depends on the customers’ ability, based on their business needs, to convince Google to agree to an acceptable amount before they even sign any agreement. In short, smaller customers may get shortchanged while larger enterprises extract some levels of compensation. However, it is an altogether different topic to be considered separately.

If you haven’t checked out Google’s own intro video, you can do so right here: