There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage Darling of the beancounters, accounting behemoth Sage is having a mid-year wobble as EU customers of Sage Drive enter Day Three of iffy service. Things had been tottering since 14 June as customers complained about performance. Symptoms of Sage slowness included not being able to log into the company's Sage Accounts 50 service …
Well maybe you should have used your own server if it is so important.
But no, you followed the siren song of The Cloud (TM) and now you're learning that all those assurances and contract terms are worth less than the paper they were written on.
One day, people will learn that, if your data is mission-critical, you put the money on the table and hire the competence to ensure that it stays up, you don't go hiring Someone Else's Server thinking you're covered.
Because you're obviously not covered as well as you think.
"Well maybe you should have used your own server if it is so important."
Sage* is crashy on local installs as well. The official line from Sage is that the cloud version is actively developed and more stable. At my last job, we opted to leave Sage products completely instead of moving to the cloud, but that's a nontrivial process.
*"Sage" can refer to one of many different products. There's the variant in this article, there are a batch of Peachtree products rebrands as Sage, etc. The common thread are the name and terrible software design.
Sage Drive is like a kind of Dropbox that syncs the Sage data files between different computers. Actual Dropbox, or Nextcloud or whatever won't work if you have multiple people accessing it at the same time. Samba over VPN would be way too slow to be useable.
The problem is that the design decisions they made when writing it for the Amstrad PCW, when it was the one computer in the office are not really appropriate today, when computers are approaching a million times more powerful, and operate in a networked multiuser environment.
The other problem is that other solutions either don't have the same feature set as Sage (eg Zero, Quckbooks) or are overkill and way too complicated to deploy (SAP, Oracle).
The best way to deploy Sage in a multiuser environment is on an RDP server with the data saved on the same machine that the program is running on, or on a storage pool with a minimum 10Gb/s network connection to your RDP server.
This is what happens when you buy a service. The trouble is that smart marketing and sales people convince directors that this is the way forward.
This is going to continue happening across the board because those involved believe the marketing BS and once you are signed up there is nothing you can do when it is broken.
What if you're a small company and can't afford your own server, your own infrastructure etc? That's the whole point of "Cloud" -- an infrastructure hosted by someone else, with technicians to keep it going, and redundancy to back it up is always going to be more reliable and safe than a server under someone's desk in a small office with one door between it and the outside world.
You go to The Cloud (TM), obviously. But then you're not in the business of providing critical data to many other companies.
Once upon a time, businesses would look at your small company and say "Work with them for my critical data ? I don't think so."
Today, The Cloud (TM) allows your small company to cheat with its abilities to reliably provide said critical data - until The Cloud (TM) falls over (again).
Tut tut. That sounds like an uncharacteristically unguarded comment from you Pascal.
Let's start again:
"What if you're a small company and can't afford [..] your own infrastructure"
Cost of a pc? Cost of a low-cost accounts package?
You need MTD? Hmm, not such a small company then, after all, but I've seen low-cost solutions that will be acceptable even for phase 2 of HMRC's rollout of MTD.
It is the same stupidity I have to deal with......
The business INSISTS to use "onedrive"... ok....... let's have 1 user upload a 2GB video of the staff party to MS cloud...
so that 50 users can access it from the SAME office as the uploader....
No sorry ... you are only IT we INSIST you fix it, but it MUST be in the cloud..... it is NOT to be stored locally.....
and WTF did the directors office to offsite AGM get continually interrupted, what is the problem with the WIFI system....?
No you cannot have money to spend on traffic shaping... no one else uses it in the international organization..... TP-Link is good enough, becasue if it was no good they would not be in business...
Head in the clouds has been a statement for woolly thinking for ever...... as far as I am concerned "In the cloud" has just been the excuse used by ex (failed?) double glazing salesmen (salespeople?) who do do know have a clue about IT systems to explain what they nor the customer understands.
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