Meridian 1

Microsoft has shown that cloud computing (and business process outsourcing in general) has big risks and no guarantees. A recent problem for Microsoft personal customers is a stark warning for business users. Last week, Microsoft’s Danger unit experienced a huge outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data

Cloud computing is a popular trend that is being promoted heavily and one that we have had concerns about for some time. We like to think of our company as innovative and open to new ideas, but we have so far been unconvinced by cloud computing. Where any data is held on external servers, we ensure that backups are taken and transmitted back to our server here, which has a frequent and multi-level security backup regime.

The Microsoft problem is a timely warning to consider moving data to ‘the cloud’ very carefully or, if you are already using external data services, to ensure a robust back-up procedure that moves the data out of the cloud and into a tangible, physical medium is good risk management – which is a requirement for any Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), not just cloud computing.