• ZDNet, Thursday, March 4, 2010 1:53 PM

Hoping to build confidence in the safety of cloud computing, Google will now offer enterprise customers something called "synchronous replication." Simply put, the free feature backs up data within Apps to multiple data centers so that, if a disruption were to occur, the amount of data lost (or the amount of time without access to the data) is minimized greatly.

"Every action you take in Gmail is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, we nearly instantly transfer your data over to the other one that's also been reflecting your actions," the search giant explains. "Our goal is not to lose any data when it's transferred from one data center to another, and to transfer your data so quickly that you don't even know a data center experiences an interruption." Google goes on to qualify this statement by saying that "no backup solution from us or anyone else is absolutely perfect." Consider yourselves warned.

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