There is no question that the Cloud holds a lot of promise, but it also has its risks. Just this week, Intuit, the maker of the very popular QuickBooks accounting software, suffered a very serious, multi-day cloud outage.
What does this mean? Their web sites were down at www.intuit.com and www.quickbooks.com. More importantly, over the past several years, Intuit has quietly baked in a lot of cloud dependant services into their software. If you use Intuit Payroll Services inside QuickBooks, this is a cloud service that depends on Intuits data centers. During this outage, you were not able to process payroll.
E-mailing invoices and purchase orders from within QuickBooks also relies in part, on Intuit's cloud and you may not have been able to send those documents. If you accept credit card payments through QuickBooks, you may not have been able to get credit card approvals or receive the deposits associated with them.
In the latest version, QuickBooks 2010, Intuit has also added highly integrated document management, to scan and attach accounting documents like packing lists and bills, to the QuickBooks transactions they are associated with. You could not access these files during the outage.
If you use Intuit's hosted version of QuickBooks, you could not use your accounting software at all during this outage. Was this the end of the world? No. What is inconvenient and an interruption to your business? It may have been. Could you have worked around the outage? You should have been able to, provided you had considered these possibilities and had backup plans and processes in place.
In this specific example of a cloud outage, you should have been able to continue to work using manual processes, whether that was writing checks, processing payroll manually and keeping track of the days receipts by hand. However, if you had not considered these possibilities, it was likely an extremely frustrating couple of days.
The point is that the cloud is not infalible. There will be outages and you need to have plans in place to deal with them. While the Internet has become extremely reliable, don't kid yourself, there will be outages. Whether it's your ISP or your cloud service provider, outages will happen and you need to have backup plans in place to keep your business running effectively during these periods. Embrace the cloud, but do your homework and be sure you have considered the risks and taken reasonable steps to mitigate them.
