Google wants us to move all of our data to the cloud. And yet, they keep having issues where a service that many people rely heavily on goes down. The latest is Google Calendar, which has been down for many people for well over an hour now.

via You’ve Got A Date With FAIL, It’s On Your Google Calendar (TechCrunch April 28 2010) – MG Siegler.

The challenges of connection to Cloud-based applications are not, of course, just limited to Google, they’re challenges faced by all Cloud-based applications from Gmail to flickr to Facebook.

But it’s more than just a Cloud-based application going bad. It’s about access to Cloud-based applications in general. Here’s who and what I see standing between me and my Cloud-based applications (assuming I have a good Internet connection in the first place):

• The company who runs the Cloud-based service – the most basic element of the deal. At worst it can go out of business. Having its service go down is the second worst and the least worst is that it can cut off access to my account by accident.
• My password/user name – if I don’t remember them or someone changes them I’m immediately locked out from what might be data accumulated over years.
• Fees – if I have to pay a fee for the service (either at the basic level, or, more likely, at a premium level) and I don’t pay those fees I will no longer have access.
• Those who control access to the application apart from the owners of the Cloud-based application itself. (See this article: Gmail Banned by Iran; Is Twitter Next? at TechCrunch by Leena Rao (February 2010) for an example of that).

Then there are the two possible connections to the Internet that can get broken.

• Those who control access to the Internet, from Governments to my Internet Service Provider.
• The physical structure of the Internet itself. (See this article from 02/08).

Lots of things potentially to go wrong before I can put on Facebook that I am “looking forward to the weekend.”