Is Running My Business On The Cloud A Wise Thing To Do?
If recent indications mean anything… it might be a bit risky for you to rely on running cloud-based applications for your business.
Microsoft’s Lync instant messaging service suffered a global outage recently, and today, Tuesday, 06/24/2014, its Exchange Online customers are now having problems with the cloud email service.
Microsoft customers began experiencing problems with Exchange Online, with some customers reporting that they were unable to send or receive emails from Exchange Online, and that there were long hold times when trying to contact Microsoft customer service representatives.
Microsoft’s Office 365 Service Health Dashboard wasn’t indicating any problems with the service during this time frame.
While Microsoft couldn’t be reached for comment on the Exchange Online outage it has yet to share information with customers on the nature and full scope of the outage.
Many customers have been venting frustrations over what they consider to be an unsatisfactory level of communication from Microsoft regarding the outage on online forums and on twitter.
The above situation points to one of the dangers inherent in using cloud based services, if those services are down, and or your data isn’t available, you are basically dead in the water.
This reminds me about an incident a number of years ago involving people loosing access to their Hotmail accounts. This went on for several days while users were unable to send or receive emails internationally. Businesses and consumers that relied on timely emails had to create impromtu workarounds. This was later
determined to be due to unscheduled maintenance surrounding an mail routing server. When the source for the issue was determined, it was a technician who had taken the server offline and actually had it on a bench, dismantled.
While cloud-based services may be less expensive that other alternatives, you are basically ceding control over both the application and the data to someone else.
If you would like some more information on non-cloud based applications, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Sales Department.