David Ahn

Great article and very relevant, Candace! Cloud computing is really considered to be the next best thing since sliced bread to happen in IT. This article points out so much of the pluses of cloud computing. We’ve begun implementing quite a few cloud based solutions and it definitely bumps up our capabilities. Another side benefit is that it requires internal IT groups to bump up their own skillset and performance. I liked this quote: If you can spend less time ‘keeping the lights on’, you can spend more time making your technology do useful things which meet the needs of your business.

I’ll be interested to hear how others feel. The risks you guys raise are excellent – security of data and access. Data security is the #1 issue I hear – but my thoughts have always been around the – “these guys wouldn’t be in business if they couldn’t do it right” mindset.

I’m a property accountant. Our company uses the cloud-based version of QuickBooks and I HATE IT. I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. It’s slow to load, it kicks me out all the time, things that used to take two seconds in QuickBooks now take at least thirty seconds, which, when you’re processing a lot of data at a time, is a lot. Cloud-based QB is the bane of my existence every. single. day.

Ahem. Pardon my passion. So you can see, access is the A-NUMBER-ONE issue I have with cloud-based computing, with security running a close second. We use the cloud-based system so that the property manager can access financial data even when she’s out on property. I understand why, and in that capacity, it does really well. It’s just that everything is so much slower, and sometimes the entire thing crashes for hours at a time, which forces me to do things I don’t like to do – such as hand-write checks. And the crashes happen at least once a month.

Those are the downfalls that I see on a daily basis with my experience in cloud-computing. I’m sure all the starlets who stored their nude photos in the iCloud would cite security as their number one concern, and I have to say – that entire debacle made me seriously question what has, until this point, been a pretty airtight feature of cloud-computing.

Also – did anyone else notice that Microsoft wrote that article?