@John Baxter
First off, if the outage is purely an in house problem, then its at least a problem of your own making, so to speak. Of course in house outages may occur due to issues relating to sources you have little or no direct control over but at least you have the sense of feeling that its your problem and you are taking steps to deal with it.
And there in lies the rub. When you are the one dealing with the problem, it brings an entirely different dynamic to the whole coping strategy and optic as opposed to simply knowing your services are down and hoping to heaven that those out there in control will bring them up again ASAP.
When its your problem and your the one working on it, the situation brings many things to the table that are important to long term decision making. Firstly, you are likely to get far more informative and timely updates as to the current status of your outage. This among all things is of paramount importance for those in positions of responsibility who make the decisions. It at least brings some confidence to the process of recovery if the answers one is getting indicate that indeed everything that can be done is being done. It also helps to know that those working on the problem for you are working on your problem specifically as opposed to doing things in a way that is perhaps best for the company hosting your services in a more general way even if it means further delays for you specifically.
Could the in house outage be longer then the cloud outage? Of course, its kind of a crazy question actually. Its like saying what is likely to be worse, falling ill at home or in a hospital? Without any further parameters characterizing the question its almost pointless. You might catch a cold at home but catch some kind of flesh eating disease at a hospital. Or visa versa. Or whatever. A more important point is this. Any company providing reliable cloud based services should by all accounts have numerous backup and fail safe protocols that the average small business just doesn't get into. In those respects it makes the cloud based service generally more reliable when serious issues arise that would need those kinds of things in place. On the other hand, when something goes really bad with one of these big service providers it could be very bad because with the kind of back up they have only the really bad would typically have an impact.
Its like my father used to say about four wheel drive vehicles, they don't get stuck often, but when they do its a disaster.
Without an in house backup you are really left to the mercy of the powers that be with cloud computing. Not getting on the spot detailed timely updates on the recovery process and little to no say whatsoever in any remedial plans to avoid the same thing happening in the future. And of course, as an individual person or organization, having little to no priority in your interests over that of the provider or of any of the multitudes that they are servicing. And the fact is, many of the better in house backup plans might well put into question the need for cloud based services at all.
Cloud; not yet ready for today.
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