Some businesses wanting to break away from the strangle hold of complex licensing agreements and expensive support have opted to use Google’s ‘free’ email service Gmail instead. A ‘no brainer’ some would say. A free service backed by one of the largest names in the sector and used by millions worldwide – what could possibly be the downside?

Well, unfortunately, Google has been experiencing a few glitches. Gmail went down last Wednesday and only came back up a little more than 24 hours later. 24 hours too late for some irate CIOs….and this wasn’t even an isolated incident.

But without the safety net of corporate SLAs how can anyone be held to account? It seems that most of our members have some sort of definition for what constitutes a severe disruption as well as agreeing response times.

But is choosing a ‘free’ service like Gmail more of a balancing act with cost saving? Users often don’t understand that by saving the organisation potentially millions in licensing costs, a compromise may have been made with support.

Is this an arrangement that corporations should be making or is email now such a business-critical application that it needs its own high level SLAs?