Google Apps users are now guaranteed 99.9% uptime, or a time-credit on their Pro account. But reliability isn't the turn off. Here's what New Zealand businesses tell me they really want. But first, some recent history:

Lately Google Apps users have been grousing about the amount of time Gmail's been offline. If you're an amateur web mailer, that's annoying. If you're using the $US50 the year per user Pro version of Google Apps  (represented in New Zealand since August by Fronde) as your office suite, or to run your website, it's bad for business.

Now Google has moved to reassure business users with a new service level guarantee that aims to clear the clouds around around its cloud computing initative.

The new Google Apps Service Level Agreement (here) promises 99.9% uptime for Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Sites component services.

If downtime exceeds 0.1% and you're a Pro user, you'll get three extra days on your annaul subscription. If any App is down more than 5% of the time you'll get seven days' credit. If downtime exceeds 10% you'll get a 15 day credit.

Google claims its downtime for Gmail, at 10 to 15 minutes a month on average - though an outage in August and an outage in early October were longer - and so within its 99.9% range at most times. And some individuals have been left without service for hours.

Growing up in public
That's all well and good. And as a Gmail and Google Apps user, I've found the services fine. There have been a few minor glitches and a few times I've had to try a couple of times to connect, but certainly the glitches are nothing worse than you encounter with more traditional software (one difference as Google enterprise manager Matthew Glotzback notes on his blog, is that SaaS outage take place on a public stage: "The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses").

It's the humans, stupid
Recently, I asked NZ Post research and development manager Joe Bourque whether he'd consider expanding his trials with SaaS suites into a full-blown implementation.

Probably not for another five to 10 years, he replied, citing security as the reason. He wasn't about to put senstivite NZ Post documents up in the cloud.

Earlier, at an IBM conference in Auckland, I asked a table full of Chief Information Officers whether they planned to deploy Google Apps (or ThinkFree or Zoho or Microsoft's Live products, soon to be joined by web versions of Office apps).

I mean you've got to love the price, right?

To to a CIO, they were implacably hostile to the notion, unwilling to even experiment with Google Apps. Like Bourque, they cited security fears.

What fears could those be? I mean, nobody's ever hacked Google, whose servers are heavily protected; certainly packed behind more protection than most private networks.

That's not the point, said one of the CIOs. He elaborated that one unwitting tweak of a Google Calendar or Google Spreadsheets setting by his tech-challenged CEO could make screeds of his company's processes, and data, public. 

Within a closed company network, it's relatively easy to herd problem users into line. Using the latest versions of Microsoft Office, Exchange and Windows Server, for example, you can tightly control who can remotely view a calendar, and even who gets to email what document outside the building. But once all your programs, and much of your data, is out there in the cloud, it's much harder to wrangle those dumb user errors.