• The Forecast Calls For Cloud

    CFJC-midday-interview
    by Andrew Bates | May 04, 2016

    In a recent TV interview, I was asked whether “Cloud Computing” was just a passing fad or something that businesses should be planning for. I believe that a general move to Cloud-based computing is inevitable.

    In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a book called The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google in which he draws a convincing parallel between the rise of power generation in the time of Edison, to the growth of centrally delivered computing today. Long ago, factories had to be built near a power source, or had to construct their own and employ electrical engineers to keep it running. Once Tesla’s alternating current allowed the delivery of power from a generation source to anywhere, people stopped building their own power plants. I believe we will see the same evolution with computing. Why build and maintain your own network, when computing can be delivered on demand to anywhere on the planet?

    Softrak started talking about moving Adagio to the Cloud in 2014. As usual, we underestimated the effort that would be involved in the migration, but the platform went to Beta in 2015, and went live on January 1, 2016. We now have 7 organizations hosted on Adagio Cloud, six of whom have migrated from an on-premise deployment of Adagio.

    For me, the most interesting usage for Adagio Cloud was a First Nation running Adagio that did not have a local area network between their various administration buildings. They ran independent databases that had to be reconciled each month. However, each workstation had access to the Internet. Moving to Adagio Cloud allowed them to run a fully integrated Adagio setup, configured with departments instead of separate databases. Their monthly reconciliations disappeared. Their accounting is more reliable. And they had no additional infrastructure to be purchased.

    Not all Cloud-based implementations will be managed by Softrak. One of our largest Adagio users set up their own private Cloud service, hosted and maintained by a separate company. They have remote access to their centralized accounting from their various offices, and the branches themselves have almost no IT to maintain. Backups and Data Integrity Checks are centrally managed.

    Adagio Cloud is economical because resources are shared across many users: the site, hardware and operating system maintenance; the implementation and setup, including the disk storage and computing resource.

    I also believe that Adagio Cloud has solved some of the main objections that an accounting department may have about moving to The Cloud:

    1. Who controls the Data?
    2. When do I have to do Updates?
    3. What happens if I decide Cloud is not for me?

    I’ll talk about these issues in a future blog post.

    Andrew Bates