Finance Departments Move to the Cloud

Based on a recent research report prepared by Saugatuck Technology on behalf of Intacct, the adoption rate of cloud-based financial software has accelerated dramatically. In fact, according to their research, the adoption of cloud-based business applications is moving from a second "wave" of mainstream adoption to a third wave they call ubiquitous adoption.

According to the study, there is big shortfall in the effectiveness of the current, and traditionally on-premise, financial solutions to meet the critical needs of a business. At the heart of the problem lies the lack of timeliness of financial information required to make effective decisions.

The research shows that finance executives already see cloud-based solutions “as a way to bridge many of the effectiveness gaps, increasing significantly the ability of finance to deliver on it’s goals”.

When interviewing a panel of over 100 experienced cloud-based users to rate their satisfaction levels, more than 84 percent agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied. Less than 3 percent showed any degree of dissatisfaction!

This is a tremendous endorsement from arguably the toughest body of users within a business setting. Finance people have very high standards of excellence and aren’t prone to simply adopt the next big thing, just because of it’s increased popularity in the marketplace. And in addition to these functional or operational advantages, the financial and technology advantages of the cloud model are well documented.

If these kinds of discussions are taking place in your organization, give us a call at TrueCloud. We can help your business find it’s way to the cloud as well.

Dave Rice CEO, TrueCloud

www.truecloud.com

Straight Talk about Cloud Services and Outages

I think we can all agree, there has never been a service outage where users of the service came away satisfied. The fact that a loss of service occurred is a guarantee that some users are going to be inconvenienced for a period of time.

Whether a business chooses to have their e-mail hosted with an on-premises solution or in the cloud does not eliminate the possibility of an outage.

Despite the outage from 2 days ago, Google’s service levels are still in excess of 99%, which is consistent with the service levels attained by other cloud solution providers that TrueCloud partners with (including NetSuite and Telesphere). How many businesses can boast that achievement for a comparable price?

And the truth is, that the vast majority of users were not terribly inconvenienced and frankly didn’t require or even expect an explanation as to the nature of the outage.

Not unlike an electrical power outage affecting our homes, which everyone has experienced at one time or another, most of us wait diligently while the services are restored. We’re not particularly concerned about the nature of the failure (fallen tree, backhoe cut, etc.) unless the restoration process proves to be lengthy.

We also realize that with a ubiquitous service, there is safety in numbers. The providers of the service have every possible incentive to take the proper precautions and spare no reasonable expense, to avoid the circumstances in the first place.

How many businesses can honestly say that they are operating their IT infrastructure with that same mindset everyday?
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Dave Rice CEO, TrueCloud

www.truecloud.com