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Moving to Saas: When is the Right Time to Decide?

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Waiting for “a sign” may be a poor approach to preparing your business for success in the coming months and years.

Instead of looking for a “tipping point” moment that forces you to consider migrating from on-premise to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), begin looking for the gaps between your operation’s current functionality and where it needs to be.

Those gaps can include the level of in-house expertise, inefficiencies that can’t be solved, underutilization of resources (staff and/or equipment), lack of capital or appropriate staff for desired expansion.

Often the decision process can be framed by asking these three questions:

  • Can our business afford to stay in place?
  • What can we afford?
  • How can we best position ourselves for growth in a competitive market?
     

Take IT Stress Test for External and Internal Threats

External factors include:

  • Natural disasters - floods, earthquakes, fires. If the building housing your IT is destroyed, or inaccessible due to a natural disaster, does your business grind to a complete halt?
  • Cyberattacks and hackers - are you confident your firewalls and IT support staff are up-to-date and effectively guarding your company against a cyber attack or hackers?
  • Power outages - in the event of a power outage, does your physical location have generators in place to keep your IT system functioning? For how long?
  • Internet outages - if your enterprise internet or wireless go down, what is the exposure or risk to your business?

Do you have business continuity plans in place for maintaining your enterprise’s core business functions during an external event and ensuring your records and data can survive disasters, attacks including malware and ransomware as well as outages?

Internal threats include:

  • Loss of employee(s) - how many people in your organization are responsible for managing your company’s tech? If you lost them, how quickly could they be replaced? 
  • Employee skill set and domain knowledge - who is in charge of making sure your organization’s internal tech skills and industry knowledge stay up to date?
  • Expansion/growth -  can your current IT system and the employees that support it handle your company’s plans for growth? Do they understand how to leverage tech to help you get there?
  • Physical space - if you needed to purchase more IT equipment, does it fit within the budget and is there appropriate, secure space for it?
  • Business process -  who owns the action plan when systems go down or equipment fails?

In the final analysis, moving to SaaS with the stable and secure backing of Trimble and Microsoft Azure is about giving your business more options to do what it does best while enabling it to take advantage of leading-edge technology and expertise. A move to SaaS offers you and your team the ability to access your data and information along with the power to act on it–from a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop–from anywhere in the world.