Who needs to be convinced about cloud availability?

In the wake of Google's announcement that their SLA for Google Apps is now 99.99%, with all downtime (planned or unplanned) counting toward the SLA, the question has arisen: is service availability still a valid reason to avoid cloud services? At this point, the question may be less a matter of numbers and more one of perception and education. For whatever reason, people tend to believe two things about the availability of the technology they own/use, especially in the workplace:

1. It should just work, all the time, without any issues.
2. If I can see/touch it and know the people who run it, it's more reliable and I know issues will get fixed more quickly.

These sentiments remain prevalent across both technology consumers and IT professionals. Google's announcement speaks to the first point - IT is seen as a utility that is always available to be consumed, like electricity or water. This point is the more rational of the two, and cloud providers tend to aim at educating potential customers about the results of building an infrastructure that understands and accounts for component failure while continuing to provide services. SLAs and uptime figures are published and cited to support providers' arguments, and they generally meet or exceed people's expectations. Indeed, millions of people use a cloud service all the time - Gmail, Facebook, Twitter - and already use these services as utilities: always on and available when needed.

But what about the second point? Why is such value and importance placed on knowing exactly where the technology is and who runs it? In many organizations, end-users tend to know and (hopefully) trust their local IT staff, which makes them more confident that when something breaks, the IT team can be counted on to fix it. People also like to know that they have one or more specific IT people they can contact if something goes wrong, and that they can influence or control the IT people to get the problem fixed.

IT organizations are also complicit in reinforcing the stereotype of the IT organization that can fix anything and jumps at every issue.  The idea of the IT "hero" or "wizard" is long part of our culture, to great apparent emotional benefit.  After all, who doesn't want to feel like a hero sometimes, especially when being perceived that way can help ensure IT headcount and investment? This tendency absolutely benefits both parties in terms of customer satisfaction, but also presents challenges in moving toward a model that includes the cloud (or any third-party managed solution).

So cloud providers' challenge is two-fold: persuade IT organizations that infrastructure maintenance is not where they can add the most value to their organization; and then help IT to convince their consumers that local doesn't always mean better when talking about service delivery.  Helping IT reconsider its position in the organization may require providers to seek partners that focus more on technology strategy, as Google and Microsoft have begun to do, and craft messages in their opening pitches and materials that help IT management visualize their new role and value. If providers can clear the first challenge, IT will likely champion addressing the second.