Restarting the free accounting search

Posted Jul 31, 2017 17:49 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Restarting the free accounting search by tialaramex
Parent article: Restarting the free accounting search

And, coming back round to the topic of cloud services, "go bankrupt" is a perfectly good continuity plan for a sufficiently unlikely eventuality (it was my previous employer's continuity plan for "what happens if our site is hit by a nuclear explosion", for example). The question then becomes whether or not a failure of any given cloud service is sufficiently unlikely that "go bankrupt' is a reasonable continuity plan.

You also have to have a reasonable assessment of the likelihood of your outsourced service failing as compared to (e.g.) your in-house service being hit by a catastrophic failure. Accounting in the cloud makes business sense if the likelihood of your cloud service failing is much smaller than the likelihood of any in-house service suffering a terminal failure.

This does, BTW, currently tend towards preferring big centralised services; if (to choose a random example) Salesforce.com goes under, your creditors are much more likely to accept that this is an exceptional event worthy of offering special terms than if your office server explodes in a shower of sparks and cannot be replaced in a reasonable time period. Not least because there's a decent chance that your creditor can't tell what you owe them until they recover from the shock, too.

As a non-business example, my continuity plan for "home hit by a hurricane" is "panic!".