Yes, Google has removed the scheduled downtime clause from their Google Apps for Business SLAs. That’s how confident they are about their Cloud services availability. They’re treating all downtime as unscheduled, for which their customers should be compensated for.

Since everyone is making predictions for 2011, I decided to jump in this yearly bandwagon myself… So, with limited liability and not too much analysis, these are my predictions for 2011 when it comes to technology and the cloud market.

Alongside my colleagues at Fujitsu and colleagues from CA Technologies, we have published a paper on how to leverage the Symptoms Automation Framework (SAF http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/saf/) in order to align the high level business requirements of a Cloud consumer to low level operational responses of a Cloud provider.