Note: Don’t miss the upcoming Cloud9 Real Time 2013 Summit in San Diego Bay on August 14-16 to get up to speed fast on all things related to accounting and cloud-computing.
In recent times hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and electrical blackouts caused company owners and accounting pros to reflect on disaster recovery and cloud computing.
How could they keep their companies operating when circumstances beyond their control were occurring with increased frequency ?
Here are several stories from financial professionals and firms whose use of cloud-based prevent rain from falling on their clients’ parade during these back-to-back events.
Becky Livingston at CPA2Biz Blog reports –
When Lynnea Bylund, President of business consulting firm Catalyst House, launched their Quickbooks services division three years ago the focus was to build a California SMB client base. During the power outage, she was only slightly concerned about losing connectivity. She was more thankful that they had moved to the cloud and all their resources were no longer in one location. “We wanted more security and 24/7 support, which we got with our cloud provider. The security is just unprecedented.”
Lynnea also mentioned that when her company had in-house IT, they were learning and doing and spending more with IT than they ever planned on. When Catalyst House moved their processes to the cloud, they were able to better focus on their primary businesses.
“More than 85% of our clients, which are CPA firms, could have been impacted by last year’s san Diego power outage,” commented Robert Chandler, President and CEO of Cloud9 Real Time. “It could have brought them to their knees. But with the cloud, there wasn’t even a blip on their radar screen. None of our clients experienced downtime during the power outage in Southern California. The cloud did not collapse.”
Carol Michaels, Director at The Finance Department, said her office was closed for four days after the hurricane that hit the northeast. “On Monday, we used smartphones to communicate with our clients,” she said. “On Tuesday all employees were working from their home or our partner’s home, which is also designated as our disaster recovery site. We got back in on Thursday, only to be evacuated again on Friday morning due to a gas leak. But, we didn’t miss a beat thanks to the cloud!”
>> Continue reading at CPA2Biz
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