AT Accountants & Advisors

Uninterrupted Accounting

By Anthony Trochilas | December 10, 2014

Here is an interesting article was published in Accountants, Bookkeepers, Company News in Xero’s blog post on 20 November 2014 by Duncan Richie

At Xero, we love the cloud. The ability to do accounting online, from any location and on any device provides unparalleled freedom to ensure our customers can get their work done quickly and efficiently.

It’s no surprise that accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses regularly tell us the ability to work on the go, and real-time syncing of accounting files to the cloud are some of the most sought-after features in their accounting software.

And we know that’s why any disruption to that access online can be infuriating and potentially detrimental to the bottom line of our customers.

Recently, some of our partners have experienced outages, something that can cause a loss of confidence across the industry. As the industry matures it’s clear that all ‘clouds’ are not the same and we wanted to reaffirm the effort we put into ensuring that outages to Xero are a rarity, if they happen at all, while maintenance windows are scheduled to occur when they are least likely to affect our customers.

To this day, we have maintained continued availability 99.99 per cent of the time and have never suffered a multi-day outage.

Xero has been a cloud-based product from day one — we were born and developed in the cloud, so we have significant experience in how it works and what it takes to keep running.

We are constantly optimising the infrastructure we use to serve our customers and we will continue to do so in the future.

Xero is a true cloud accounting product. We are not syncing large files between desktop and server. You do your work online from anywhere, at any time, without needing to install cumbersome software or locate a central accounting file.

Many accountants have been sold the idea of having a local copy of data on their desktop as a back up. Well, that’s been shown to not be so reliable. Those hybrid solutions just cannot deliver the true benefits of the cloud. Syncing is not the answer.

The biggest risk to cloud availability is your last mile connection. A truck hitting your telecoms cabinet at the curb is probably the biggest risk to get true cloud applications. We recommend having a few paid mobile data cards or 4G cellphones that your team can tether to is the best form of redundancy.

So to all our customers, happy uninterrupted cloud accounting!