Take Your Leap into the Cloud
Source: AICPA CPA Insider
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by James Bourke.
As I travel the country one thing is extremely evident … everyone has heard about the cloud computing “revolution.” Now, taking that awareness to the next level – migration and implementation – is very often the challenge that has held many back.
Let's take a high-level approach and view some of the steps that a CPA firm should take when going from “legacy” systems and applications to those found in the cloud.
How Much Bandwidth Should You Have?
You need to move from a “garden hose” to a “fire hose” and every effort should be made to obtain the largest amount of bandwidth affordable.
Which Area to Target First?
Tax-preparation applications are the easiest and best target for testing the cloud model. An extremely close second is content or document management.
Once tax and content management solutions have been migrated, it would be time to explore other practice areas. Vendors are now starting to become more plentiful in areas such as:
- Practice Management
- Electronic Workflow
- Employee Evaluation
- Education and CPE Tracking
Don't forget about migration of other solutions commonly used across many industries. Some good candidates for migration to the cloud would include e-mail solutions such as Microsoft Exchange, Office, SharePoint and more.
The other areas that benefit from the cloud model are those on which we collaborate with our clients.
A handful of vendors in this area do collaboration and do it well!
Intaact, with its Intaact Accountant Edition clearly has an understanding of how we can add value by collaborating with our clients.
Bill.com is another vendor that allows CPAs to collaborate with their clients.
For the complete article, read “The Move to the Cloud.”
From AICPA CPA Insider, May 23, 2011, http://www.CPA2biz.com.