I hear your pain. As ever, it is horses for courses. Large organisations do as they wish, look at the number of services that Google has released and then canned. I seriously feel for anyone who also invested in the original FileMaker Cloud and are now being forced to move. Equally, one browser update can break a perfectly good cloud based system.
On the other hand, there are the little guys, like us. We’ve spent over 10-years investing in our cloud security. I could give you the address, username and password for any of our servers and you would not be able to log in.
The vast majority of our clients have been with us for many, many years. Although we’re not really taking on new hosting clients, as mentioned above our infrastructure is now a delivery mechanism for our SaleFaith CRM systems. In 10 years no customer has had a compatibility problem, you can run FileMaker 15 on Big Sur or FileMaker 19 on Mac OS X Panther, and any changes needed are managed and carried out by us with no disruption to our customers.
This is due to our approach of using more classic technology in the cloud, rather than looking for pure web interfaces. Yes, with WebDirect we can offer it, but it is not yet fully featured.
However, the key thing is that we’re a family firm, our customers are just one level down in importance to that of our children. If people want to contact us they call us, we talk to them and know most users personally, despite the many countries they may be based in.
This brings me back to the definition of cloud computing. Other than uploading, downloading files and printing, everything is processed in the cloud in our streaming system. We take responsibility for absolutely everything for the service we provide, as there is no software installed on Windows and only RDP workspace software on Macs, IOS, Android, Chromebooks, etc.
We are still at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft, it wasn’t long ago Microsoft released an update to Windows 10 that broke their own RDP services. Microsoft were not interested in this and grudgingly released an update a couple of months later. At great cost in time we found a work around with the help of a Microsoft forum, that was so similar in contribution to the old FileMaker community. This ensured our customers continued to work despite the problem being a Windows 10 issue, not our cloud service. When Microsoft released their ‘fix’ it broke the temporary fix that enabled our customers to continue working. Hence, we had to redo all the work again via site visits and remote support.
The point of the above is to show, like everything, one word cannot describe everything.