My enthusiasm for cloud ERP has dampened a bit in the past few months.
The only cloud outage that affected me even slightly was when Blogger lost its ability to allow me to post anything for 20 hours. It certainly was nothing like having no access to your email or the outage that Platform as a Service vendor Amazon experienced recently.
My concern is that if the cloud can still be this fragile for giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon…are any of us truly safe in the cloud? Sure they have better data centers for backup, but what if we can’t get access at all for even a day or two? It’s not like being asked to hold your breathe for a couple of days, but it might feel a bit like being water boarded for an hour or so.
I read a good article where someone was proposing a hybrid approach such as Exchange in the cloud but then a local install of Outlook. I wish I could remember where I found the article.
At first I thought-great idea for email but then realized we can’t all download a huge ERP database down to our desktop for redundancy so that we can keep working should an outage occur.
So those IT staffs that keep resisting the cloud have gotten more valid reasons behind their “kicking and screaming” behavior toward being pushed toward cloud computing.
I think these messes will get sorted out quickly and happen far less. Redundancy will be improved and we will read about this only among much smaller firms shortly. The cloud is coming for economic reasons. It’s cheaper and safer overall.
We had a discussion the other day among our ERP consultants for how often our people have to restart or fix client backup maintenance plans. I was amazed how many times this happens. My guess is that this never happens in a professional data center. So once the alarm at these recent outages passes, we will get back to the economic reality that IT resources can be expensive and not always as effective- in smaller businesses especially.
