The Cloud Reconsidered - Intuit Outage Aftermath

PC mag's Samara Lynn wonders if the Intuit outage, notwithstanding its president's apologies, means the cloud is an iffier proposition than experts had maintained. The consensus: no, it's still a good bet. But just in case, here's how to protect yourself against the worst.

"Intuit's service outage this week affected Quickbase.com, Quicken, Quickbooks and TurboTax, leaving more than 300,000 largely SMB customers in a bind—unable to access critical data like employee payrolls, databases and other financial and business services. Service has been restored, and Intuit CEO Brad Smith has apologized for his company's nearly two days of downtime, saying that the company had failed to live up its own standards of dependability. Now that the outage is over, however, businesses are looking past Intuit's problem to question of the dependability of cloud-based computing in general.

Forecasts for 2020? Should businesses be worried about the cloud model? It depends on who you talk to. In the remarkably well timed "The Future of the Internet," a new report released last week by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, the majority of experts surveyed were markedly bullish on the cloud, with 71 percent of experts agreeing with the statement: "by 2020, most people won't do their work with software running on a general purpose PC." Instead, the experts believe, "they will work in Internet-based applications, such as Google Docs." (And, I imagine Office Live Web Apps, which also released this month.)"