A US take on Intuit's Amazon journey
Carrie Kahn will be presenting at Accountex USA 2018 in Boston, August 22-23. Click on this link for a complete list of conference speakers.
Hosting is a hot topic. As more and more companies move to the cloud, improvements are being made continuously to improve the reliability of their services. As you may see posts on social media, your feed may become loaded with reports from customers and QuickBooks ProAdvisors when their QuickBooks Online is down.
These outages happen unexpectedly and can cause a business to lose money. ProAdvisors are unable to do their bookkeeping and cannot charge their client for their downtime. Intuit has been listening to the complaints and has recently been making significant changes to address them — including moving QuickBooks Online to Amazon Web Services.
Intuit recently announced its plan to move hosting for QuickBooks Online to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to “accelerate developer productivity and innovation.” Intuit sold its largest data centre located in Quincy, Washington. Many major corporations are finding it is better to move to AWS than to run their own data centres. A few years ago there was some concern about the security of Intuit data centres, as well as some concerns about reliability. This move to AWS will address both concerns.
Slower performance
Intuit’s data centre was dedicated to TurboTax and QuickBooks Online. As you can imagine, TurboTax caused the data centre to spike during tax season, which resulted in slower performance for QuickBooks Online users, or even outages. This transition should bring more stability to QuickBooks Online users — which is GREAT news!
During tax season, Intuit started the migration of TurboTax to AWS and was finished by the end of tax season. Intuit is currently in the process of transitioning QuickBooks Online over to AWS, and expects to be done by later this year. The goal is that AWS will be able to accommodate spikes from customers during tax season for TurboTax and QuickBooks Online customers, making the service more reliable.
Xero made this transition in 2016 to improve their infrastructure and deliver enhanced customer experience. The switch to AWS provided an opportunity to continue to improve the technologies that help Xero function. It is exciting to see that Intuit is going down this path now too.
This announcement may be great news for QuickBooks Online users. We have spoken and it appears that Intuit has taken our feedback and is making changes that will improve QuickBooks Online service. We hope to see improvements in reliability and scalability for customers, developers, and ProAdvisors using QuickBooks Online.
