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 »

One of the most controversial aspects of the rapidly evolving cloud computing market among industry insiders is the idea of ‘private clouds’.

Purists insist that cloud computing is all about exchanging legacy, on-premise, inhouse IT resources and functions with online, shared resources via the Internet (i.e., the ‘cloud’).

While this is the origin of the cloud computing concept, a variety of forces have conspired to create an alternative approach referred to as ‘private clouds’.

These include valid customer concerns regarding privacy, security, reliability and performance; along with proprietary concerns among various hardware and software vendors seeking to usurp some of the spotlight away from cloud upstarts like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com.

In addition to the sourcing and marketing forces fueling the idea of private clouds, there are various debates regarding the technical implementation of private clouds which have raised questions about the viability of this idea.

Just as it … Read More »

As the idea of cloud computing gains greater attention in the tech industry and among business pubs, there is a brewing debate about whether organizations can create their own ‘private clouds’ to achieve their unique corporate objectives.

My latest commentary in E-Commerce Times discusses the pro’s and con’s regarding the idea of private clouds.