A blog by Pilothouse Consulting
Intuit – when cloud computing does not work
As a company, we rely on a number of Intuit services as well as their accounting software. Generally, we like to host our own applications if we believe that we can do a better job than the external provider. In the case of Intuit, they have been decent with their online services but not that great. I believe a big part of it is that they outsource too much themselves.
It’s amazing that most of their sites have been down for 20 hours now. This situation gives a bad reputation to online/cloud services.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Andre on June 16, 2010 at 10:54 pm, and is filed under Cloud Computing. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 year ago
I work for a company whose entire offering is 100% cloud-based, so: yes, I’m biased, but…
Suggesting that this isolated, though major, incident casts doubt on cloud/online services overall is a bit of a leap.
Personally and professionally, I’d still rather put my trust in vendors whose entire business is based on securing my data, than try to maintain a fully-redundant local system.
Think about it: who’s more likely to have the resources to ensure complete data security, redundancy and multi-tiered backups of critical data – a small business running everything on their C: drive or a major cloud computing vendor of the scale of Google or Salesforce (or Quickbooks)? I know Google can afford way bigger servers and backup systems than I ever could.
And don’t forget the joy of having to install and manage local software upgrades on a PC, wait months or years for new code updates to be released, and move all your data between systems every few years when your hardware starts to crumble.
Again, this is a major outage, impacting many, many customers – but I’m confident the systems will be fully restored in due course. Living with some occasional downtime is still a better option, IMHO, than trying to rebuild/restore everything on a crashed local hard drive.
about 1 year ago
I agree with all the points you make. With cloud computing it vendor choice becomes extremely important. I believe that the biggest downside of cloud computing is that you do lose control on upgrades. For example, Google recently upgraded Google Docs and removed a number of features. Good luck to you if you depended on those features.