Down about Uptime
Quickbooks users (whether on prem or online) will have some tough questions for the vendor following downtime on Monday and early Tuesday morning last week. It wasn’t widely reported but must have created a significant problem for users. TG Daily correctly points out that downtime can have a serious impact on accountants, especially when it hits on a payroll day. (Ed: we don’t subscribe to TG Daily’s thinking that accountants are stuffy with a difficult disposition. Well, not many anyway 😉
As the cloud takes hold, security and downtime are being talked about a lot. Although the former seems to be less of an issue as end users, including the largest financial institutions in the world, realize they have been using cloud services for years without incident.
Uptime (forgive me, I want to be more positive about this), on the other hand, is one area where cloud platforms like Force.com really distinguish themselves. Imagine having the visibility and transparency of https://trust.salesforce.com/trust/security/ across all your business applications. If there is planned downtime you’ll know well in advance. If it’s unplanned, which rarely happens, it’s remedied fast.
Surely that removes much of the headache for the IT department. And it should make the business users feel even better, since as TG Daily summarizes, “financial sites going down are a real drag and can affect the everyday lives of ordinary people like you, me and the person sitting next to you in that ugly cubicle.”
It has to be a serious consideration when considering your cloud application strategy.
