CLOUD VS. ON-PREMISES: IS THERE A RELIABILITY DIFFERENCE?
Salesforce.com, a widely used and respected cloud CRM product, experienced an outage on June 28, 2012. You can read more about it at Salesforce Outage June 28th.
Amazon Web Services also had an outage on June 30,2012 which brought down well-known websites such as NetFlix, Pinterest and Instagram. Read more at Amazon Outage June 3oth.
Cloud opponents (i.e. on-premises advocates) will point to these occurrences and say “I told you so. The cloud just isn’t reliable enough to trust”. Cloud advocates scoff at that notion, trotting out availability numbers of 99.98% to discredit the naysayers. So who’s right?
Well, the truth is that neither claim is right. This topic of cloud system reliability and availability highlights some myths that exist in both the cloud and the on-premises camps.
One of the myths involves on-premises reliability. If asked, many on-premises advocates and users would dogmatically claim that their system is available 100% of the time. Of course, that’s not true, but every time an on-premises system is unavailable, you don’t hear about it in ComputerWorld. On-premises down time is likely comparable to any cloud system when server issues, software and hardware upgrades, electrical, environmental and networking problems, etc., are considered.
The other myth is that if the cloud providers claim to be up 99.98% of the time, then that’s the end-user’s availability. That’s just not true. The actual availability for a cloud end-user depends heavily on the reliability and speed of their own Internet connection and ISP, and not just the reliability of the cloud provider’s data center.
For all intents and purposes, I believe that system availability/reliability is exceptionally high for cloud and for on-premises systems, and to give one or the other an advantage in this regard would be folly.
DSD Business Systems sells the highest quality Sage Software on-premises and private cloud ERP and CRM solutions, and we sell NetSuite, the most widely used cloud ERP solution. Look for us at www.dsdinc.com.
Doug Deane is President of DSD Business Systems, a national provider of on-demand (cloud) and on-premises ERP and CRM software, specializing in wholesale distribution, manufacturing, warehouse management, inventory, business intelligence and eCommerce software. DSD offers Sage 100 (formerly MAS 90), Sage 300 (formerly Accpac), Sage 500 (formerly MAS 500), NetSuite, Sage FAS, Sage HRMS (formerly Abra), Sage CRM, Sage SalesLogix, Extended Solutions, and Custom Programming.
