The Battle Over Productivity Clouds

Let’s summarize.

More than 3 million businesses, from mom-and-pops to big corporations, use Google Apps today—which includes email, documents, calendars and more—to communicate and collaborate in the workplace.

Later this month, Microsoft will be releasing Office 365, its long-awaited answer to Google Apps for Business. Office 365 includes Office Web Apps--the company's online counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint --plus online tools that let you  access email, calendars, and contacts across PCs, the web, and mobile phones. Many businesses are starting to look at these solutions as a means of offloading non-strategic IT workloads. 

Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of Office 365 and Google Apps:

Even Apple is getting into the game. Earlier this month Apple announced iCloud which lets people store documents, presentations, photos, digital books and apps in a Web-based locker and get access to them from their Internet-connected devices.

All of this points to a growing trend of cloud-based productivity.  As more and more workers are taking their work away from their desks on mobile devices, and bringing their own smartphones and tablets to work. 

Which tech titan is going to "own" the cloud?

It’s anyone’s guess, but Microsoft certainly has the initial edge.  Though Google remains the search king, it has nowhere near the user base that Microsoft does for any of its apps. With 750 million Office customers and millions of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) users in play, Microsoft can "win" this cloud battle by attracting more users to adopt Office 365. However, for organizations who want to get started quickly with a cloud package and don't need features as rich as Microsoft's, Google's option is friendlier and better priced.

But, some trepidation is in order.

Amazon’s, Google’s  and Microsoft’s BPOS  recent outages illustrate how all cloud services can experience downtime and even data loss.  The possibility of at least some downtime is baked into cloud contracts; the question is what happens with the outage is so catastrophic that it results in data loss, or delays so lengthy they cause a client to lose revenue.

These concerns should give you pause, but not dissuade you from the cloud.

Cloud-based archiving can help provide a secondary backup and insurance policy for your message data (since it captures every message you send or receive in a centralized repository). Plus, it reduces the traditionally high switching costs by giving you the freedom to migrate your data from one cloud provider to another. Just as important, several modern archiving solutions let you leverage the archive as a continuity platform to send and receive messages when your primary cloud solution fails.

So, your cloud-based productivity doesn’t need to falter even if one of your clouds burst.