All they have done is taken the analysts, programmers and data managers and hidden them behind a Chinese screen called a cloud. You don't get the service for free, you are still paying for it, maybe not as much, but then you will not be getting a truly bespoke service, more of a generic one size fits all solution. As you mentioned in a previous post an ideal solution for a small enterprise, especially if the management have no high level programming skills.
No, that is not what they have done at all.
They’ve created a huge and varied suite of tools and applications that enable and help their customers to operate their businesses in a professional manner. They’ve responded to market demand and built generic, customisable solutions that work. As a result, it’s a very different business world from even ten years ago.
Take accounts, the original subject of this thread. You solution for the small business is to file paper invoices and receipts and take them to your bookkeeper once a month to “do the books”. So your books are always a month out of date and are, at best, only a record of what happened in your business over a month ago. But use Xero properly and your books are near live; I can tell you what the cash situation in my business is today, right now. But that is not all; I cam use the feed from Xero to model any number of scenarios in in my business and inform me of my resource needs. That kind of stuff wasn’t available to big corporates a decade ago.
Next, look at sales, marketing and CRM. A decade ago, even some big companies ran their CRM on a spreadsheet! Now they all have properly integrated systems that track the customer / client from first contact through purchase / contract into after sales care. So now I can operate my three micro-businesses on the same CRM platform as mega-companies like Southwest Airlines, Toyota Marriott and Lilly. The same system that government department are using to manage customer experience. And what’s more I can scale as I grow, without ever needing to re-platform.
I think you are totally out of touch with this. No-one bespoke anymore. They want easily customisable, reliable out of the box systems that don’t need an army of IT geeks on the overhead. Nor do they want managers who are paid to manage their business applying their “high level programming skills” when they are supposed to be managing the business.
As for security, I think once again you are out of touch. Between them SalesForce, Shopify, Xero and Square, the four key cloud platforms we use, have over 2 million clients. None of them have ever been the victim of hacking. None of them have lost client data. All of them operate to the highest statutory standards of data protection and all have the top level of credit card security. Their businesses are built on providing data security; if they weren’t secure, they’d go down.