In this post I talked about the dangers of cloud computing. I mentioned that the service Entegration utilizes for it’s Help Desk support system is from Intuit and is called QuickBase. At the time of the original post Intuit had just experienced an outage of the QuickBase service that lasted around 24 hours.
Intuit has now experiencing a second major outage that has the QuickBase service unavailable for almost two days. That’s right, QuickBase is unavailable for almost 48 hours. Our customers are not able to log support tickets or get the status of previously submitted support tickets. As I mentioned in my original post, we have alternative methods for clients to interact with us regarding support.
The issue here is not Entegration’s Help Desk support system, the issue is the reliability of cloud computing. Frankly I put a lot of trust into Intuit because of their company size, the resources they have, and their reputation. This last outage has made me think twice about utilizing the QuickBase service moving forward. But more importantly it has made me wonder about the reliability of any cloud based service. Entegration can survive without our Help Desk support system but what if it was an EMR? Could a practice afford to be down for 48 hours without access to electronic medical records? Could an accounting firm be without their accounting system for 48 hours?
Cloud computing is very attractive but cloud computing can have have a dark side. When the application that runs in the cloud goes down, it can bring a business to it’s knees. Most of the time there is no alternative to running a cloud based application locally so when the application is down there is nothing a business can do.
Many practices are evaluating cloud based EMRs. I have been fairly neutral on the prospect of cloud based EMRs. I have thought to myself that if a practice doesn’t have to invest in a lot of infrastructure and they can be up and running in a short period of time then a cloud based EMR makes a lot of sense. But now that I have experienced first hand the dangers of cloud based computing, I would be highly skeptical of utilizing a cloud based EMR. The dangers are much more real then I imagined in the past.
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