Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.

The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

The company’s CEO, Brad Smith, did a good job quickly apologizing to Intuit’s over 300,000 customers who were affected by the outage. His blogpost also explained the cause of the disruption and made a public commitment to put new policies and procedures in place to prevent the problem from occurring again.

Smith’s response was certainly better … Read More »