SharePoint 2013 SP1 Pulled…so how do I trust Office 365?

It seems like Microsoft just had this same thing happen in August 2013, another in September. They’ve pulled SP1 for SharePoint 2013 on prem (I know I’m a little late…this post has been a draft for a while). My point is, though, it’s going to happen again.

With that in the back of my mind, I go back my toils and troubles trying to sell Office 365 in my organization. The pushback I get comes from the usual arguments –

“Remember BPOS”, “We tried it a few years ago at my previous firm”, “Can’t trust MS with my data”, “What happens when there’s an outage?”.

Etc., Etc.

Many of these are easily foiled. We all know that they’ve finally got it right, and we all know that it’s only going to get better. I feel that one of the primary wins for going O365 is that you offload some of the responsibility onto Microsoft – they’ve got an SLA and if they miss it they pay you back. I think that’s a pretty good model too because outages/interruptions, while they do happen, are rare and manageable.

But this pulling back of a SharePoint Service Pack just makes my argument on behalf of O365 all that much harder. What happens when they drop some bum code in the datacenter where my SharePoint Online is housed? What happens when they drop bum code into my Exchange datacenter? Of course meas