Gmail users suffered an outage last week for up to 4 hours. Most Gmail users are enrolled in the free plan but many businesses and organizations pay money for Google’s premium services. For instance BRASSmedia pays Google $50.00 per year for our  ‘branded email’ – dean.owen@brassmedia.ca. It works well for us. It’s cheaper than other email providers, has great spam filtering, expands as we need it, they perform infrastructure upgrades and backups, it’s web/mobile based so available from anywhere and it includes enhanced versions of their other online services like calendar and docs. I would be tempted to say that it is the best 50 bucks I’ve spent in a long time. So Google’s compensation is 15 free days extended onto their premium customers contract. That works out to 90 hours of compensation for every 1 hour the Gmail service was unavailable. When was the last time your service provider compensated you at a 90 to 1 ratio. If your email system is managed by your internal IT department, what compensation did they offer the last time the system was down? All in all, even with the latest outage, Gmail premium services has good value for money.

Branded premium Gmail services is not for every company or organization but if you run your email system in-house or through an external provider and suffer chronic problems with availability and usability then it may be worth looking into.  

Dean