WATCHING SLOW MOVING CLOUDS
I've been following a LinkedIn thread titled “What is the most common mistake that you see being made by small to medium businesses as they migrate to the cloud?” in the Cloud Computing group for a couple of weeks now. The participants are, in many cases, senior technologists at major companies.
Everyone in the discussion agrees that, fundamentally, moving to the Cloud is not a simple thing. On the contrary, it’s a big deal. It involves readjusting and transforming the way a company thinks about and implements its IT. It involves shifts in integration, in security and identity management, in process and procedures, in reporting and analysis. It’s all about “transformation” and “migration.” It’s pretty “in the weeds”: the more you dig into it, the more technical the discussion gets.
We agree. When it forms a fundamental part of IT and business operations (like Infrastructure as a Service—IaaS) the Cloud makes sense. But there’s a certain all-or-nothing flavor to it that we don’t agree with completely when it comes to restaurants. It’s not so cut-and-dry: to Cloud or not to Cloud.
Which is a good thing, since when restaurant owners think “Cloud,” they’re not thinking about creating holistic programs, or forcing fundamental shifts, or adopting IaaS across the enterprise-wide computing paradigm . . . or anything like that at all. They’re thinking about revenue and bottom lines. They just want the best price/performance tradeoff from their POS.
A true Cloud POS—where there is no software installed on your computer or device—is fundamentally another Internet application, like the ones you use to order products or register a car or any of the many things people do online. They’re great, but you know you have to tolerate performance issues. Sometimes they’re fast and sometimes they’re slow. Sometimes a page crashes (for one of a dozen reasons) and you have to reenter data. It just goes with the territory of an online application.
The question remains price/performance: can I tolerate that kind of experience in my business? Or better yet: where can I tolerate that in my business? (Look back at my earlier post on the Cloud: I make the point there as well that the Cloud delivers value in some areas of restaurant operations, and not in others.) Can I tolerate it at the bar? In the back-office? At the drive thru window? On the floor?
It could be that those delays don’t impact your back-office operations enough to be an issue—here price/performance might point to the Cloud. But when customer service is in play, I think those kinds of unpredictable delays frustrate staff, slow down service, and make customers unhappy.
Yes, good Cloud POS solutions today are addressing all the problems that can be addressed. Good data security, effective backup for your data and their servers, PCI compliance, and more. But the simple physics of online applications makes it so that the Cloud may not be the perfect solution for every type of business. There are pros and cons to both cloud POS applications and on-premise POS applications.
If you need help weighing your options and outlining your business requirements, contact us for a risk-free, no-obligation consultation.
