Why Our Customers Choose Workiva and the Cloud: Reliability

Finance, accounting, risk and compliance professionals have given us many reasons for choosing Workiva. In this blog series, we are exploring each of 10 top reasons organisations are moving their reporting and compliance to the cloud.

Imagine preparing a document for your annual financial report or working on the final prospectus in the midnight hours before your initial public offering, and the unthinkable happens: a storm knocks out power to the office, the server crashes and no one from IT can make it in to help you retrieve the documents and spreadsheets you need from your hard drive.

Setbacks like this can raise the stress level of everyone involved. At a minimum, it could lead to lost time retrieving files or repeating steps. At worst, it could mean missed deadlines or a late filing.

You cannot control when a network crashes, but you can limit how often it happens by choosing a reliable platform where you store your reports and data. In fact, reliability and redundancy are a significant reason organisations choose Workiva and the cloud.

Reason Number 8: Reliability and redundancy

When you arrive at work, you expect your desk and computer to be there, with your files intact. The same should be true when you log in to files in the cloud. A reliable platform is key to making sure your working documents are always available for smooth business continuity and disaster recovery.

Cloud providers can ensure reliability by distributing and replicating data across their multiple systems, providing redundancy in case of failure at any single point. If a major disruption like a natural disaster strikes one data centre, cloud providers can shift to another. Having data centres and servers in multiple physical locations in different regions also reduces the chances of complete failure.

How Workiva delivers on reliability

Workiva relies on multiple data centres and office locations to provide operational redundancy. The nature of our cloud business means the teams who support you can work from anywhere, providing flexibility if any single location goes down. In addition, members of our team are on call, 24 hours a day, every single day to help you, even if you are up all night trying to meet a deadline.

Those are the measures you can see. Behind the scenes, Workiva works with powerful infrastructure providers, including Amazon and Google, to bring the dependability needed for critical, continuous business reporting. Google and Amazon are unmatched in their networks, application hosting, and data security. As a result, our platform has better uptime, scalability, data redundancy and fault tolerance than a traditionally hosted or on-premises system. (You can request Service Organisation Control (SOC) reports from our website for your security and compliance needs.)

Going one step further

In addition to assuring network reliability, Workiva also gives teams peace of mind in the reliability of the data they report. I don't want to get too far off the topic of operational reliability, so you can read more in my post on data governance. I'll just say that by giving accounting, finance, risk and compliance teams a way to link shared data across multiple reports in a single connected reporting platform, Workiva gives teams the peace of mind that their numbers and narrative are consistent.

Protect yourself

I would be remiss if I did not mention one more step to keep your work safe. In addition to the redundancy and reliability your vendors provide, always remember to back up your files. In the week before an anticipated regulatory filing, download and back up your work at least daily. In the rare event that your vendor's network or cloud software is not available, you will still be ready to roll.

We explore many other reasons organisations choose Workiva and the cloud in this blog series. If you are ready to see more right away, you can request a demo to see Workiva solutions in action.