Cloud Outages Signal Need For Different Strategy

Several providers of cloud services to small businesses, including, most recently, Intuit, have suffered outages that prevented subscribers from accessing their data. Laurie McCabe discusses possible solutions.

"This week’s service outage at Intuit is fueling a new round of speculation about the dark side of cloud computing–and whether businesses can depend on cloud-based services to run their businesses. Intuit’s problems come on the heels of other service outages this month at WordPress and Sage, and as well as service outages earlier this year at Salesforce.com and NetSuite, among others.

Clearly, Intuit is not alone, and cloud vendors across the board will need to redouble their efforts to harden, backup, continuity and disaster recovery services. Customers will also demand more transparent, accessible visibility into ongoing performance, downtime and problem resolution, and compensation when downtime exceeds guarantees in vendor service level agreements. And, as stated so well in a Hubspot blog, cloud vendors must put a a proactive social media strategy in place to lessen the fallout when a problem does occur."