Businesses are rapidly evolving in how they do work in part because of collaboration technologies. These collaboration tools connect businesses to their customers and interconnect various business units. Traditionally, businesses have been managing these tools on their own. But with their increasing criticality and importance to the organization, companies cannot afford any downtime with these systems. As such, companies are struggling to maintain them.
One of the options to prevent maintaining these tools is to collaborate with a cloud-based service that will support the tool for you. That way, you get the tools without spending the time, money, and effort on maintaining them. Once you migrate these tools to the cloud, you can establish baseline expectations on what the system should provide in terms of reliability, security, and general maintenance. This will allow you, as a user, to focus on becoming more productive without spending the time and effort to maintain these systems.
What are the challenges associated with migration?
You have an option to do a migration yourself or rely on a vendor-based service. If you choose to do it yourself, you will need some knowledge of cloud infrastructure, which may not be the best use of your time or resources.
In some cases, companies have no option but to utilize the cloud. Traditionally, businesses have been managing these tools on their own. If you write your software and are using a public cloud like AWS, you have to assess whether your security and overall policy will be met in the new cloud environment. In addition, you must have the technical expertise to do the migration. Your organization may or may not have this expertise.
Even if you have the expertise, it may be better utilized towards your business goals. If your revenue comes from writing software, you may need to focus solely on that without worrying about maintaining collaboration tools. Migrating to the cloud makes you more productive and innovative.
There are significant benefits of cloud migration such as:
• Eliminating Capital expenditures: The number of software tools organizations is using for collaboration is increasing. If you are running the systems yourself, the amount of bandwidth and resources you need to manage those systems is also growing.
If you are also running traditional software, you also need to manage any license issues in addition to tracking the license lifecycle and usage of your tool. You would need to monitor how many users are using your systems and have an appropriate license count to avoid overspending. You also need to be aware of how many licenses you need regularly.
Because of the additional maintenance and monitoring, it may be easier to place these tools on someone else’s cloud
If the system goes down or is unresponsive, the cost can add up very quickly. Having a secure cloud provider can save you money. If you are getting the system from a vendor, they are responsible for meeting the SLA for uptime, being responsive, and reliable.
• Customizing workflows: Individuals and teams within a business rely on collaboration tools as part of their daily workflow.
If you are a business user, you may need software to draft business requirements with your peers. You also need to track the state of these business requirements — whether they are in the initial stage or execution phase, or somewhere else on the timeline. In terms of workflow, that can be a challenge if these requirements are running on-prem. No matter what the organization, you need existing tools to communicate to the cloud. Even if you can write on-prem systems, you need existing tools to talk to the cloud and communicate with other systems like your vendor systems, customer systems, and SaaS-based services.
Traditional (on-prem) IT is not designed to handle these kinds of systems as there is a lot of cost and policies you need to circumvent. In traditional IT, it is harder to establish the interconnectivity of tools and processes to customize your workflows. If your systems are natively on the cloud, it is easier for systems to talk to each other. Within your company, you have individuals, teams, systems, and workflows that span across multiple teams and systems. Ideally, you want these systems to be automated as much as possible. A lot of cloud-based tools have built-in integration, and you can use third party systems to connect them. The benefits of customizing workflows are scalability, cost-effectiveness, and removal of manual work. It also helps to break down silos. You can envision the whole software pipeline — from ideation to execution to customer support.
• Ensuring reliability: On-prem systems are more static and may not change for a long time. However, on the cloud, the vendor is responsible for ensuring the system is up-to-date and able to handle changing user needs and accommodate an increasing number of users. If you run into reliability issues, it requires a lot of time, money, and effort. In a cloud-based system, the vendor is responsible for ensuring reliability. You must be able to rely on your systems and tools. It is essential because of the serious cost associated with it.
How can Addteq help through this organizational change?
Our cloud offering, Codefactori, can help your organization work through change. Our goal for designing Codefactori is to alleviate these issues, such as low reliability, high capital expenditures and the inability to create custom workflows, so businesses can focus on their business goals. We make sure the software is maintainable, patched, and secure. We offer a self-service support model where authorized users from the customer side can put in their support tickets. We also support customers by helping them customize systems and workflows. We can quantify the ROI, which is substantial. We also meet the security and compliance needs of our customers. Overall we provide a fine balance between customization and SLA-based support.
Our customers don’t need to support the system for their users. We offer a choice of many levels of service to our customers. Customers have an option to customize a service to their needs.
Conclusion
Cloud migration eliminates capital expenditure, enables customization of workflows, and ensures reliability. By migrating to the cloud, you can focus on your business goals without having to worry about maintaining your collaboration systems. The key is to choose the right cloud-based hosting partner that can provide an SLA bound service that ensures that your system is reliable, secure, and maintainable. Our Cloud-Management Service, Codefactori, can ensure that your system is always reliable, secure and maintainable.
