Cloud computing holds a lot of promise, but it also has risks. Recently Intuit, maker of the very popular QuickBooks accounting software, suffered a very serious, multi-day cloud outage.

And how did this affect them? www.quickbooks.com went down for hours. Also, over the past several years Intuit has quietly incorporated cloud dependant services into their software so if you use Payroll Services inside QuickBooks, you would not have been able to process your employees’ hard earned salaries.

E-mailing invoices and purchase orders from within QuickBooks also relies on cloud and you may not have been able to send them. If you accept credit card payments through QuickBooks, you may not have been able to get approvals or receive their associated deposits.

In QuickBooks 2010, Intuit has also added highly integrated document management to scan and attach documents like packing lists and bills to QuickBooks transactions. These files were also inaccessible during the outage.
If you use Intuit’s hosted version of QuickBooks, you could not use the software at all. This may have been an inconvenient interruption to your business, but all companies should be able to work around such occurrences by considering these possibilities and backup plans:

In the instance of a cloud outage, be prepared to continue to work using manual processes. Whether writing checks, processing payroll, or keeping track of the day’s receipts. If you have not considered such plans, a cloud outage could lead to a very frustrating several days.

The thing users must remember is that the cloud is not infallible. There will be outages, and everyone needs a plan in place to deal with them. Fortunately, your team of Responza IT consultants are disaster recovery experts ever at the ready to keep you dry when the cloud is all wet.