With the announcement that Snapchat has gone ‘all in’ on Google Cloud Platform, Snap has incorporated this plan into their financial filings as an additional ‘business risk’.
“Any disruption of or interference with our use of the Google Cloud operation would negatively affect our operations and seriously harm our business…”
My immediate reaction was really to question whether this is a business risk, or a business assurance? Certainly Snap is now dependent on Google’s ability to scale and manage a massive infrastructure, and so the disclosure is appropriate. But as a prospective investor, I’d feel that a great potential risk to the business, loss of availability of the Snapchat service, has been greatly reduced.
If there was a book maker taking odds on the likelihood of various companies making technical and/or operational missteps that cause an outage, Google would not be the company I’d bet on. Quite the opposite, I think they’ve proven over the last 15 years or so that they’re pretty good at running large infrastructure.
As this reality begins to sink in with investors, partners, customers, and business leaders, cloud adoption will accelerate beyond current predictions.
