The Road to the Cloud…

…is full of potholes

“The cloud” is the future.  I believe that, and I’ve moved many of my personal, business, and client services to the great beyond.  But it is still a work in progress – some examples:

• At the Scaling New Heights conference last month, The Cloud was the topic of every keynote address.  Yet the hotel where the conference was hosted had a flaky, if not downright substandard internet connection that meant many of us could not actually get on line for more than a few minutes at a time.
• Intuit, where my professional fortunes are largely tied, has had a very rocky history of maintaining its online services without unannounced outages.  Just last week, their payroll service experienced a multi-hour outage on Wednesday afternoon – precisely the time thousands of companies around the country where trying to submit data for Friday’s payroll.
• Apple today announced, with much fanfare, iCloud – but without the streaming feature many expected.  I see this as acknowledgement from Apple that the infrastructure isn’t here yet to move one’s music catalog to the cloud. As much as I love Pandora (enough to actually pay for the service) there are many times I can’t access it.  Like on an 11 hour plane flight, when I really want to listen to my music.  Or in a tightly populated urban area like downtown San Francisco.

Given the above, and similar examples, at this point in time, I probably wouldn’t suggest that a company, except under particular circumstances, move their entire business applications to the cloud.  That’s why I like companies like Method – that allow you to have both local and cloud based access to your QuickBooks data.  Or Bill.com, which syncs beautifully with QuickBooks, and lets users out of the office process some transactions on line.  A POS solution is ShopKeep – it is cloud based, but has a built-in provision for disruptions in internet access.

Until everyone has always on – always stable internet access, and the companies hosting the data have a track record of maintaining their services, the immediate future to me looks more like a hybrid of local and cloud based access.