The greater integration enabled by cloud technology brings with it a collection of problems that can only be mitigated if you have a reliable hosting service provider. When it comes to cloud-hosted QuickBooks subscriptions, then all of your data streams are connected to a single database that might go down for any reason. There are numerous security risks when you go with a cloud-hosted data management solution, technical training requirements, and much more.
Just for perspective, Lloyd estimates that the losses would amount to $19 billion if the US cloud were to go down. Generally, organizations are insured against these losses, but it’s only a small fragment of the total losses—that really wouldn’t help with the losses from a crash of that scale. These crashes can occur for any number of reasons, with cyber-terrorism as one of the biggest risks faced by US cyberspace. According to reports, nearly 4.1 billion records were compromised in 2019, it’s estimated that cybercrime generates $1.5 trillion in revenues, and nearly 300,000 reports of cybercrime are reported every year.
Considering the risks to your cloud infrastructure and the potential losses from cloud crashes, you must pick your QuickBooks Hosting provider very carefully. Before finalizing your choice, you should ask them the following questions:
Who Do They Serve, and How Many Clients Do They Have?
Before you can ask someone to manage your sensitive data, you need to assess their reputation in the market. Ideally, you’d want to work with a QuickBooks cloud-hosting service that works with data-intensive organizations because that will show how well they can manage their servers. The next thing to ask them is how many clients they serve and if they can share that information with you—this question can tell you two things:
- If they manage a lot of clients, you need to be sure whether or not they’ll prioritize your needs before other clients. A lot of times, high-profile clients become a priority for service providers because they’re bringing in a lot of money. You can’t have that happening to you because you need your service providers to always be on top of their game when it comes to data security.
- If they don’t have too many clients, then that tells you their services aren’t reliable or clients don’t stick around with them. When you’re talking about data management and cloud hosting, organizations usually stick to one service provider because the logistics associated with data migration and system implementation are a major hassle. A QuickBooks cloud-hosting service with few clients probably isn’t very reliable, which is why they can’t generate a large enough portfolio. Another reason for the lack of clients could be that they just started—and while they might still offer a great service—do you want to take that risk?
What Customer Support Services Do They Offer?
We’ve already spoken in great detail about all the things that could go wrong with your cloud, something will inevitably come up, but can the service provider handle it? Your cloud hosting service should be available 24 hours a day to spring into action the minute you report a problem with your system. They should have the technical skill to resolve all of your issues and prevent recurrent problems with your solution.
You should grill the service provider to make sure that their technical support services can resolve all of your concerns. It’s a telling sign of a great QuickBooks hosting service that it’s always available to solve your problems.
What Security Measures Do They Implement?
The rate at which organizations are reporting data breaches is alarming. According to the latest reports, cybercrime instances have increased by 13% over the past few years to reach values of $13 million annually. So when you’re going out to see who should handle your data, they need to be taking all possible measures to minimize the risk to your organization.
Are They Authorized By Intuit?
Irrespective of which QuickBooks packages your service provider offers, you should always ask them this very basic question. Intuit conducts all the checks to ensure that anyone affiliated with them meets their requirements and can manage to sustain the high-quality standards the customer expects. Having approval from Intuit tells you that these people follow the proper procedure with respect to QuickBooks hosting services.
What is Their Uptime?
Uptime is the number of hours that the cloud managed by any QuickBooks hosting provider is up and running. It’s calculated using a very simple mathematical formula:
The higher this number, the less time the service provider’s servers are down. You want to go with a service provider with the highest uptime because it’s an indicator of how well they manage their servers.
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