With all the outages plaguing the SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors recently there seems to be lack of independent rating system telling customers just how reliable each particular cloud service is.

For example, see Richard Watson’s notes from the recent Catalyst event in Prague:

When discussing SaaS, I’d like to see a SaaS suitability rating for each class of applications, like an electrical appliance energy efficiency rating, or credit-worthiness. So maybe we’d give ‘AAA’ to the productivity suites that Guy Creese surveyed yesterday evening and maybe a single ‘A’ rating to CRM.

My guess is that it takes time before such rating emerges (although this might be a chance for someone to just set the standard rating which everyone will start using - like Gartner did with their market quadrants - anyone? Burton group?)

The more practical approach meanwhile is to simply start tracking the outages publicly so needless to say I was pretty excited when I found such a page linked from Kevin Kelly’s blog: Cloud Computing Incidents Database.

This is a wiki page so I highly recommend everyone in the community to start participating and adding information on any incidents: outages, security breaches, and so on - happening in our emerging SaaS/Cloud space. It looks like at the moment the site is still not well attended. The last week’s Gmail outage was not listed - and I added it to the table:

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