Yes for data. Data is easily recovered, but under the circumstances that your cloud apps suddenly become instantly unavailable, how do you recover your applications?
You don't - you have to migrate and retrain everyone, which if you've used all the features in your cloud platform requires major process and tooling rewrites.
With an offline solution, you can shelve it and migrate slowly. When someone else hosts it, you're at their mercy.
You mean google apps? Well, you could keep a local copy of office around, it's not exactly rocket science.
When someone else hosts it, you're at their mercy.
And when you host it, you're at your own mercy.
Matching the availability of google tends to cost a little more than a hypothetical day of downtime would.
There are plenty valid concerns about hosting your office in the cloud. However, availability and TCO are normally the main arguments for google apps, not the other way round. Those infrastructure costs really add up when you're talking thousands of seats.
OK what about Google Apps Script, Forms etc? You're stuffed there. That's where the rocket science starts to kick in. It's not as simple as it looks. Oh and as part of the cost cutting, can you afford to splash out for Office company-wide suddenly out of the blue?
If you have thousands of seats, you should have the budget lying around to do it properly and a team of people to handle it. The TCO if you include risk is an order of magnitude lower if you manage it yourself. I've done the figures enough times for enough companies to know this.
Most companies operate "on the line". An event like this would take them offline permanently.
Well, no idea how you calculate that. Google would have to be down several days every year only to offset the staffing costs for running your own equivalent to google apps. And that's not even getting into hardware, licenses and the expensive windows-lockin that everyone seeks to escape nowadays.
I guess we'll just have to agree on disagreeing here.
You don't - you have to migrate and retrain everyone, which if you've used all the features in your cloud platform requires major process and tooling rewrites.
With an offline solution, you can shelve it and migrate slowly. When someone else hosts it, you're at their mercy.