CPA_Practice_Advisor_November_2020 - 10

FROM THE TRENCHES
DOES YOUR FIRM HAVE A CLEAR VISION FOR HOSTING:

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, SaaS
" IF YOU SAY it really fast, it sounds easy. " I smile when I think about this phrase because
I know where I learned it and why. It pairs up with another favorite saying of mine, " the
difference between a professional and an amateur is knowledge of, and practice of, the
little things. " Within the past week, I learned a quote that is useful for this column on
hosting. " Amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can't
get it wrong. " One last phrase that applies, " An amateur can be satisfied with knowing
a fact; a professional must know the reason why. "
I have the utmost respect for
teams that make data centers and
hosting facilities work. The less you
know about the mechanics of making
a large-scale application or hosting
facility work, the easier it sounds.
However, creating an environment
that can run 24x7x365 with 99.9999%
reliability is almost impossible. It
takes a team of dedicated engineers
to make things work reliability,
responsively, and securely.

NOVEMBER 2020 ■

Yet we expect that our applications or apps simply run all the time.
During the last half of this year alone,
we've seen outages from Microsoft,
Wolters Kluwer, Intuit, and many
other applications that are critical
for our profession. Are they the only
ones? Certainly not! If we look back
two years, the list becomes onerous.
Check out https://downdetector.com/
archive/, and you quickly see that
many services fail every day. You

www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com

can specifically look by service or
vendor, and it doesn't take you long
to realize that cable communications
providers frequently have outages or
performance issues, which would
make it appear as if an application
or hosting provider has failed.

SO, WHAT SHOULD BE
OUR EXPECTATION?
Simply put, it doesn't matter how
well a vendor has built a service;
there will be failures.
In an ideal world, most
outages or scheduled
downtime would occur
at a time of day when the
service was not needed.
For example, an outage
in the middle of the night
or over the weekend may
not affect you because
you are asleep or enjoying some recreational
time off. But if you have
tax deadlines, filing
deadlines with regulator y agencies, public
reporting, or various
other time-constrained
activities, not being able
to work matters.
As we have explained
in previous columns,
you can build your own
private cloud on your own
premises with hardware

RANDY JOHNSTON

EVP & Partner
K2 Enterprises &
CEO of Network Management Group, Inc.
randy.johnston@cpapracticeadvisor.com
@RPJohnston

servers, storage area networks, solidstate drives, virtual machines with
VMWare or Hyper-V, adding remote
access with RDS, Citrix Virtual Apps,
and Desktops or Horizon View. By
the time you add backup appliances,
multi-factor authentication, and
mobile device management, you have
a lot of moving parts that all must
be understood. You must be aware
of security with firewalls, anti-virus,
intrusion detection, switching, and
more. You have capital costs and
replacement costs. You have to have
the expertise with either internal IT
or external IT contractors that provide managed services like Network
Management Group, Inc. The IT teams
that support you must understand the
public practice profession and applications or industry you are in, such as
non-profit, healthcare, manufacturing,
construction, or distribution. From
1983 through 2014, these systems were
straight forward enough that good IT
people could wrap their heads around
most complexities. I don't believe that
is true today.
As technology changes accelerated starting in 2008, it became more
difficult for IT teams to keep up with
all the changes in infrastructure
as well as with the applications. A
single IT person faced a real challenge. Further, as risk mitigation,
firms were often dependent on the
quality of a relatively small team.
However, a private cloud deployment
could provide the fastest, least-cost
solution for less than 250 people,
including many CPA firms. Plus,

https://www.downdetector.com/archive/ http://www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com

CPA_Practice_Advisor_November_2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CPA_Practice_Advisor_November_2020