How reliable is running your business in the cloud?

The following article is a reminder to all of us that computers and infrastructure do fail. Individuals and business are now being encouraged to move their important data to the cloud. Both Google and Microsoft have had outages recently and it is good to keep this in mind.

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I started my career in large companies with thousands of users and if there is one thing I remember, it is when the system went down. Everyone in the office was affected. People even forget how to do work when the computer was down. There was always other work to be done that wasn’t on the system, but strangely when people only had their focus on the computer they didn’t think of all that filing and other work that still needed to be done.

Big centralised systems fail and when they do everyone is affected. Cloud systems are really little more than big centralised systems.

When is the last time my computer failed that I couldn’t work. Honestly I find it hard to remember. It has been years. My data has from my recollection always been available when needed. No down time. Now the cloud offers a great service, but it reminds me of the down time experienced working in organisations running their systems on mainframes.

I expect there will be outages such as internet disruption as a result of my ISP. I have two methods of connecting to the internet. I expect my email provider will have issues. I have a second email provider if required. I expect my computer will die on me one day. I have backups to cater for that situation. But when I put all me eggs in the one basket with a cloud provider, that’s a concern.

Don’t pay any attention to their money back guarantee for their up time. All they ever guarantee is the portion of their fee which is minuscule compared to the potential cost to your business when you are without your systems.

Online systems in the cloud will go down. Online systems in the cloud will get hacked. Just make sure you take this into account when the salesman is trying to sell you a cloud based service. The salesman has to make a sale or they don’t make money. You are the only person who can make sure your interests are looked after.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
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