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2013 Review of Right Networks

Brian Tankersley

Jul. 29, 2013

Best Firm Fit:Any company looking to leverage the efficiencies of the cloud to successfully grow their business. Also, firms who are looking to expand their practice and provide higher value to clients by offering them a mobile, collaborative, fully managed environment to access their desktop accounting applications.

Strengths:

  • The Company is an authorized host for QuickBooks, Sage 50 US (Peachtree), and Sage 50 Canada (Simply Accounting). Right Networks powers Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise Hosting Solution which is sold directly through Intuit representatives. Right Networks’ hosting services can also be purchased directly through Thomson Reuters Virtual Office offering.
  • Applications are automatically provisioned and are available from two high availability data centers located in different geographic parts of the US.
  • Right Networks’ HyperRight Technology allows all applications hosted by Right Networks to be accessible on a fully clustered fully redundant infrastructure.
  • Right Networks is the only service provider reviewed with true data and application mirroring in real time between two geographically dispersed data centers.
  • Live telephone technical support is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for all types of support requests.

Potential Limitations:

  • Right Networks does not create custom servers for clients, nor do they host many common tax applications, including CCH ProSystem fx Tax, Drake Tax, Thomson Reuters UltraTax CS and many other common applications used by tax and accounting professionals.
  • Each additional application added to a user’s profile has a per user monthly fee of $5-$20, which could result in a very expensive hosting bill if a user needs a complete desktop hosted.

Overview

Right Networks is a national hosting provider which specializes in in delivering access to desktop accounting software in a secure, fully managed, cloud based environment. The Company has a wholesale program for CPAs, and is the hosting provider for Intuit’s hosted offering of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, and is also Thomson Reuter’s hosting provider for QuickBooks offered as part of Virtual Client Office CS. Right Networks is certified as a Commercial Hosting Provider for QuickBooks, and is a member of Sage’s program for commercial hosts for Sage 50 US and Sage 50 Canada.

Unlike most of the other providers in this review, Right Networks does not create custom hosted servers, but rather allows users to access desktop accounting software as well as over a hundred third party applications in a fully clustered highly available server environment. The company has automatic provisioning of new accounts and the Company’s two data centers have full duplication of hardware and data. Both data centers are capable of hosting all user activity, and loads are balanced by dynamically routing users upon login to the data center with the fastest connection and the most available capacity.

The company’s network is accessed using a remote desktop protocol (RDP) connection, along with a software tool which connects the scanners and printers accessible by the user’s local PC or Mac to the hosting environment. Java-based remote connections are available for Linux and tablet users, but these tools are not supported by the company. Right Networks is in the process of developing their own mobile application to allow users to access seamlessly from any IOS or Android device.

Applications are hosted from two Tier IV high availability data centers in different regions of the country(US East Coast and Mountain West). The company reports that both of the data centers have received a SOC 2, Type II examination in the last year. Right Networks does not certify any of its products as HIPPA compliant to users at this time, but the company reports that all data is encrypted at rest as well as when in transit to the user.

The company provides all user support from its headquarters location in New Hampshire, and support personnel are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Right Networks does not restrict support tasks outside business hours to emergencies, and guarantees 99.999% user uptime outside of scheduled maintenance windows.

Right Networks offers a solution which is configured to provide higher availability within a fully managed environment for all applications. The Advantage solution will probably make sense for those who do not want to focus on IT activities such as updates, upgrades, maintenance, security, etc, allowing companies to actually focus on running their business.

Summary and Pricing

Right Networks Advantage hosting service is priced at $50 per user, per month, plus a $5 per user, per month hosting fee for all users who access QuickBooks. Subscribers are required to provide or lease their QuickBooks license. Leased licenses are priced at $7.50 or $12 per mo, per user for QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier, respectively. Subscribers are charged $5-$20 per month, per user for each additional application.