Benioff reassures cloud customers after Sidekick

After the Sidekick debacle cast a shadow over the safety and security of cloud computing, it fell to its evangelist-in-chief, Mark Benioff, this week to allay any doubts IT leaders may be having about the new computing paradigm.

At a conference in London's Stock Exchange on Wednesday, Salesforce.com supremo Benioff assured that customer downtime would never exceed five minutes, and that his firm has spent $250,000 dollars recently to further secure its infrastructure and "deliver trust to the customer".

"We have multiple global datacentres and when one is being upgraded, we keep the other one in read-only mode to keep data secure. This is an exciting change and extremely important in reducing downtime for customers," he told attendees.

Additionally Benioff disclosed all Salesforce infrastructure is run on 1,500 Dell PCs. "So it is very efficient and it makes you think about what a scam enterprise on-premise software and systems are," he said.

Benioff made his remarks following a couple of bad weeks for cloud computing services, after Microsoft was thought to have lost customer data when the company's servers crashed and did not have other back-up servers in place in a separate environment.

The data belonged to Sidekick US mobile users, and although it now turns out this data will be restored to customers, the disaster was said by commentators at the time to be the biggest data loss in the history of cloud computing.

Before Sidekick, web users had begun to trust large tech firms offering cloud services because they believed their data was being backed up safely. It may take a little more than fighting talk from Benioff to get that trust back.

23 Oct 2009