It’s widely accepted that vendors need to offer their products as a Software as a Service (SaaS) to cater to the way that media organizations want to prioritize operational over capital expenditure.
But there is no one SaaS fits all. An average company might have more than 100 SaaS apps in use; many large enterprise customers might be using 400+ and counting.
Onboarding different aspects of the business to a SaaS and then juggling them daily can be as much of a headache as managing current hardware purchases, licenses and maintenance.
“Security risks mount as vendors are added, the cloud infrastructure becomes more complex, and more apps spawn more data silos,” Thomas Donnelly, CIO at SaaS management platform BetterCloud, warns in an interview with InformationWeek. “When technology innovation is handled more coherently, though, the atmosphere improves, and the business is likely to receive the full value of new app deployments.”
“Companies need to implement SaaS apps at a fast pace without disrupting the business or compromising security. Since change is an imperative every day, your objective is not to ‘finish change’ — rather, it’s to make ongoing change normal, manageable, and low risk.”
— Thomas Donnelly, BetterCloud
A starting point can be to assign a technology representative for each department. Donnelly suggests that the tech representative’s responsibility is to recognize where applying technology change will pay off, to collect ideas, make recommendations, convey the department’s needs to IT, and help guide the process.
“Their work will reduce the number of expensive cross-functional meetings needed to coordinate projects. It will also help IT understand each department’s goals and the processes they use.”
Questionable data and conflicting metadata spell trouble for data warehouses trying to ingest the data from all the new applications and make it available. Donnelly advises IT departments to make available enough resources and bandwidth to handle the workload, whether it’s 10 SaaS deployments per year or 200.
“Companies need to implement SaaS apps at a fast pace without disrupting the business or compromising security. Since change is an imperative every day, your objective is not to ‘finish change’ — rather, it’s to make ongoing change normal, manageable, and low risk.”