The received wisdom is that desktop software is legacy and cloud software is the future. As a general statement about the industry that is obviously true. As advice to a South African business, it deserves a caveat that rarely gets stated.
Cloud software stops when your connection stops. Your connection depends on power, at your building and at the exchange or tower serving it. Backup power at your desk does not help if the fibre node is dark.
Who this actually affects
Not everyone. If you are a consultancy in Sandton with fibre, a UPS and a mobile fallback, this is a non issue and you should buy cloud software without a second thought.
It matters for businesses in industrial areas with marginal connectivity, for operations in smaller towns, for anyone whose work is time bound in a way that cannot slip. A payroll that must run on the twenty fifth. A factory that must issue stock to a production run. A retailer that must take a payment.
The honest positions
Desktop with cloud backup
Sage 50cloud Pastel and Sage Pastel Payroll keep working with no connection and sync when it returns. For a payroll administrator finishing a run during an outage, that is not nostalgia, it is the job getting done.
The cost is real: remote access needs a hosted desktop or a VPN, multi user setups need someone who understands the network, and the vendors are investing in their cloud products rather than these.
Cloud with genuine offline capability
Some cloud products cache and queue. Zoho CRM's mobile app captures offline and syncs later. A few point of sale products do the same. Where offline capability is real it is usually confined to the mobile app rather than the full product, so test the specific workflow you care about.
Cloud with nothing
Most of the category. Xero, QuickBooks, Sage Accounting, monday.com, Asana. When the connection goes, work stops. For most businesses most of the time that is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
Practical mitigations that work
- A mobile fallback on a different network to your fixed line, configured to fail over automatically rather than requiring someone to switch it.
- Enough battery on the router and the switch, not just the laptop. The most common failure we hear about is a fully charged laptop with no network to talk to.
- Scheduling the jobs that cannot slip away from the published schedule where one exists, and building slack into the ones that can.
- Exporting a current copy of critical data on a schedule. If your ledger is unreachable for two days, having last week's trial balance locally is worth something.
The conclusion
Buy cloud software. It is better in almost every respect and the direction of the industry is not reversing. Just do the assessment honestly: identify the two or three processes in your business that genuinely cannot wait four hours, and make sure you have an answer for those specifically. For most businesses that answer is a mobile fallback and a UPS on the router, and it costs less than one month of the software.