It may make sense to outsource a certain segment of your IT work, say calendars, to a respected third-party to cut costs. But what happens when things go wrong? Just ask Rian van der Merwe about his experience when Google Apps for Business caused huge calendar issues at his company:

We run our company on Google Apps for Business, and we’ve never had any problems. Until now. On Friday morning we came in to work to find that all our calendars are completely, utterly messed up. Not only did we lose data and access to our own calendars, but there appears to be a major security breach as well.

The support he has received from Google so far has been so poor that he wrote a blog post asking others for help. Why Google wasn’t able to simply restore it from an acceptable point-in-time is beyond me. After all, they do state their service has “simultaneous replicated storage for your calendar appointment” and “built-in disaster recovery.” This must not be considered a disaster.

As much as we may like to complain about dealing with internal IT folks, at least you have some recourse when you receive terrible service. When dealing with an external support center, unless you have sway over future contract negotiations, your only option may be to wait and hope for the best.