The recent outage of Google Gmail, which also affected users of Google Apps (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) is yet one more reminder of how organizations need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of using on-demand or cloud-based applications and services. As I wrote last August, in response to a larger outage in which Gmail and Apps were down for about 15 hours (and have copied below), I don’t believe that Gmail and Google Apps are really up to supporting large, enterprise end-user organizations at this time. I do think they can be considered useful for consumers and for some small companies, as well as for specific departments, groups, and selective applications. In fact, I …

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