About the risks of using clouds
Today, cloud applications have long been firmly established in our life. Almost all major software vendors offer their clients web-based applications along with classic downloadable PC applications or mobile devices that work with their own enterprise infrastructure (on-premise).
It is hard to imagine at least one day of a modern person employed in IT without using, for example, Gmail. Similarly, modern Enterprise, due to modern requirements, transfers part of its processes to SaaS. Hereinafter, SaaS will mean primarily cloud applications offered by various companies for a paid subscription. Such services can be: postal services, CRM systems, office applications, etc. Often, systems that are handed over to SaaS do not require complex integrations with a large number of enterprise information systems, which means the amount of information exchange between the SaaS platform and the corporate medium can be minimized. It is also obvious that cloud-based applications potentially have greater success among smaller enterprises due to the specifics of business processes and the simplified implementation procedure itself.
But I want to dwell on another aspect. What could be the main risk for an enterprise transferring one or another business process to the mercy of SaaS? The very first problem that lies on the surface and immediately voiced by customers is the leakage of internal data to the side, i.e., the issue of security and trust of the company-supplier of SaaS solutions. Is there anything else not so obvious, but no less significant for the company, which at once can put an end to migration to the cloud? There is, and I will try to show such an example.
By the will of fate, our small company has long used one popular foreign service, let's say, online tables. At the dawn of its launch, its capabilities were not so impressive compared to the same Google Docs. But as time went on, the service developed, grew, and we used it regularly. I will say right away that the service is foreign and rather large, therefore, the number of its subscribers amounts to tens and hundreds of thousands. There are no free subscriptions, only a trial period, after which you will definitely have to buy something. The service is focused on business users, and not on private clients, for them there is the same Google Drive. To date, he is in the TOP 3 in his niche, so his example is most significant.
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How is the software updated for the cloud? There are two options from those that I met:
Option 1 - the company notifies its customers of a small downtime window with a duration of no more than 1-2 hours. And everyone understands that since the service is primarily focused on business, then such a window is usually planned on the night from Saturday to Sunday or from Sunday to Monday.
Option 2 - the service is updated without downtime, just once the user is logged in, the user receives a banner with hints about new features (or deleted old ones).
Be that as it may, option 1 or option 2, problems arise as follows:
1. Planning for system update does not depend on the system user;
2. The user does not know in advance how the functions will be added and which are excluded;
3. Often, the user will learn about the update and the new functionality upon its completion.
If you can still accept the first item, the second and third points make you wonder: how does a business risk getting an update of the functionality of the service it uses? How can this affect his private business processes (BP)? And, most importantly, what to do if the implemented BP or its part on the SaaS service suddenly fails?
In the case of local software, everything is solved somewhat easier, the business (or rather IT in its face) has at least two options:
1. Testing of the new software version in an isolated environment (test zone) in order to work out the main scenarios;
2. Rollback to the old version of the software, if critical for business defects were found in the new one. The benefit of the universal penetration of virtualization allows you to carry out this process in a few minutes.
Returning to my example. In our Excel-like service we used, there was such a function - leading discussions on a row of a table. Its peculiarity was that it was possible to organize several threads of discussion within the framework of the discussion. Subscribers received their own notifications and somehow it worked, people used it. For us personally, this functionality was not claimed, so I did not pay any attention to it.
One day, the company decided to update the service and made life easier for users, renaming the discussions in the comments and making them all one-level. That is, now it is possible to keep only one discussion thread per line of the table where everything is dumped. Moreover, all the old discussions were transformed to this new look and there is no way back. Of course, after the update, all users received notifications about such a beautiful and convenient feature. And they got acquainted with him, of course, on Monday, when they came to work. It turned out that many users (companies) seriously used branches of discussions for some of their internal processes. For them, this functionality was business critical. What they got after the upgrade is a broken business process. Someone he was purely internal, and someone he was tied to customer service. I learned about all this by reading the community forum after the next update, where people in colors described how they lined up their work on the previous version of the service and why they could not work now either.
What company that uses this SaaS service can do about it? Only adapt to the new rules of the game, and on the living. Where is the guarantee that one of the subsequent updates will not break anything else? No one will give such a guarantee. And this is just an example of a fairly simple table service. In the case of more complex systems, such as CRM, you can imagine what you can face. Did the SaaS manufacturer think about such customers? Perhaps, but they considered their number to be insignificant and the functionality itself was not so important.
As a result, companies using this service came face to face with two problems, which I mentioned above:
1. A new version of the service breaks the functionality that was previously available. The client finds out about this only after the system update.
2. Rollback to the old version of the software is not possible. In the worst case, the data has already been processed into a new look and it can only be returned to the old one by restoring a backup copy.
SaaS services are not controlled by customers and their work is not predictable. They can not be used as key for the implementation of significant BP companies. Due to objective reasons, the SaaS manufacturer company cannot satisfy 100% of the requirements of all its customers, which means that some customers will certainly face restrictions and they will have to decide whether they are willing to put up with them or not. Updating software in SaaS is a procedure that is hidden from customers, it may be followed by irreversible changes in the operation of the service, as well as changes in the stored client data. Worst of all, the client will find out about this only after the system update has been completed and he will not be able to go back.
Perhaps, in some SaaS systems there is a certain graceful period, when a client can migrate his data to a new version of the platform and try out its work. But even if such an opportunity is provided, the manufacturer will not be able to support both the old and the new versions for a long time, which means that the client, faced with the limitations of the new version, will have to make a decision - go to the alternative SaaS provider or change the BP for the new realities of the platform .
Considering all of the above, working with SaaS services looks more like a kind of temporary solution for small and dynamically growing companies, in which BPs are not yet rigidly defined, and the SaaS service adds some degree of automation, in case of loss, the company can easily cope with manual labor and migration to another the platform is not very costly. You can expect a lot of positive feedback on the use of SaaS, but did anyone really encounter problems with updates? If not, then perhaps the experience of using the cloud is completely positive?
It is hard to imagine at least one day of a modern person employed in IT without using, for example, Gmail. Similarly, modern Enterprise, due to modern requirements, transfers part of its processes to SaaS. Hereinafter, SaaS will mean primarily cloud applications offered by various companies for a paid subscription. Such services can be: postal services, CRM systems, office applications, etc. Often, systems that are handed over to SaaS do not require complex integrations with a large number of enterprise information systems, which means the amount of information exchange between the SaaS platform and the corporate medium can be minimized. It is also obvious that cloud-based applications potentially have greater success among smaller enterprises due to the specifics of business processes and the simplified implementation procedure itself.
But I want to dwell on another aspect. What could be the main risk for an enterprise transferring one or another business process to the mercy of SaaS? The very first problem that lies on the surface and immediately voiced by customers is the leakage of internal data to the side, i.e., the issue of security and trust of the company-supplier of SaaS solutions. Is there anything else not so obvious, but no less significant for the company, which at once can put an end to migration to the cloud? There is, and I will try to show such an example.
By the will of fate, our small company has long used one popular foreign service, let's say, online tables. At the dawn of its launch, its capabilities were not so impressive compared to the same Google Docs. But as time went on, the service developed, grew, and we used it regularly. I will say right away that the service is foreign and rather large, therefore, the number of its subscribers amounts to tens and hundreds of thousands. There are no free subscriptions, only a trial period, after which you will definitely have to buy something. The service is focused on business users, and not on private clients, for them there is the same Google Drive. To date, he is in the TOP 3 in his niche, so his example is most significant.
')
How is the software updated for the cloud? There are two options from those that I met:
Option 1 - the company notifies its customers of a small downtime window with a duration of no more than 1-2 hours. And everyone understands that since the service is primarily focused on business, then such a window is usually planned on the night from Saturday to Sunday or from Sunday to Monday.
Option 2 - the service is updated without downtime, just once the user is logged in, the user receives a banner with hints about new features (or deleted old ones).
Be that as it may, option 1 or option 2, problems arise as follows:
1. Planning for system update does not depend on the system user;
2. The user does not know in advance how the functions will be added and which are excluded;
3. Often, the user will learn about the update and the new functionality upon its completion.
If you can still accept the first item, the second and third points make you wonder: how does a business risk getting an update of the functionality of the service it uses? How can this affect his private business processes (BP)? And, most importantly, what to do if the implemented BP or its part on the SaaS service suddenly fails?
In the case of local software, everything is solved somewhat easier, the business (or rather IT in its face) has at least two options:
1. Testing of the new software version in an isolated environment (test zone) in order to work out the main scenarios;
2. Rollback to the old version of the software, if critical for business defects were found in the new one. The benefit of the universal penetration of virtualization allows you to carry out this process in a few minutes.
Returning to my example. In our Excel-like service we used, there was such a function - leading discussions on a row of a table. Its peculiarity was that it was possible to organize several threads of discussion within the framework of the discussion. Subscribers received their own notifications and somehow it worked, people used it. For us personally, this functionality was not claimed, so I did not pay any attention to it.
One day, the company decided to update the service and made life easier for users, renaming the discussions in the comments and making them all one-level. That is, now it is possible to keep only one discussion thread per line of the table where everything is dumped. Moreover, all the old discussions were transformed to this new look and there is no way back. Of course, after the update, all users received notifications about such a beautiful and convenient feature. And they got acquainted with him, of course, on Monday, when they came to work. It turned out that many users (companies) seriously used branches of discussions for some of their internal processes. For them, this functionality was business critical. What they got after the upgrade is a broken business process. Someone he was purely internal, and someone he was tied to customer service. I learned about all this by reading the community forum after the next update, where people in colors described how they lined up their work on the previous version of the service and why they could not work now either.
What company that uses this SaaS service can do about it? Only adapt to the new rules of the game, and on the living. Where is the guarantee that one of the subsequent updates will not break anything else? No one will give such a guarantee. And this is just an example of a fairly simple table service. In the case of more complex systems, such as CRM, you can imagine what you can face. Did the SaaS manufacturer think about such customers? Perhaps, but they considered their number to be insignificant and the functionality itself was not so important.
As a result, companies using this service came face to face with two problems, which I mentioned above:
1. A new version of the service breaks the functionality that was previously available. The client finds out about this only after the system update.
2. Rollback to the old version of the software is not possible. In the worst case, the data has already been processed into a new look and it can only be returned to the old one by restoring a backup copy.
SaaS services are not controlled by customers and their work is not predictable. They can not be used as key for the implementation of significant BP companies. Due to objective reasons, the SaaS manufacturer company cannot satisfy 100% of the requirements of all its customers, which means that some customers will certainly face restrictions and they will have to decide whether they are willing to put up with them or not. Updating software in SaaS is a procedure that is hidden from customers, it may be followed by irreversible changes in the operation of the service, as well as changes in the stored client data. Worst of all, the client will find out about this only after the system update has been completed and he will not be able to go back.
Perhaps, in some SaaS systems there is a certain graceful period, when a client can migrate his data to a new version of the platform and try out its work. But even if such an opportunity is provided, the manufacturer will not be able to support both the old and the new versions for a long time, which means that the client, faced with the limitations of the new version, will have to make a decision - go to the alternative SaaS provider or change the BP for the new realities of the platform .
Considering all of the above, working with SaaS services looks more like a kind of temporary solution for small and dynamically growing companies, in which BPs are not yet rigidly defined, and the SaaS service adds some degree of automation, in case of loss, the company can easily cope with manual labor and migration to another the platform is not very costly. You can expect a lot of positive feedback on the use of SaaS, but did anyone really encounter problems with updates? If not, then perhaps the experience of using the cloud is completely positive?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/308062/
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