We often hear about “Cloud First”, The Qld Government has it as a policy, every boardroom is alight with Cloud discussions, the biggest companies in the world are leading the race and you should be apart of the game changing technological revolution. The technological path simply put (all be it clouded by the mystery of Public vs Private cloud) is fundamentally:

On Premise >> IaaS >> SaaS

If your not thinking SaaS , the bottom line is your paying to much for your technology. Here are some basic real questions to ask yourself. Answered honesty they will help you understand where you save money and reduce risk with SaaS:

1. Can your IT department compete with the economies of scale of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM etc.?
2. Does you IT department perform any infrastructure maintenance tasks?
3. Do you patch anything?
4. If you got rid of Infrastructure Managed Service (whether internal of external), would you need as many IT staff?
5. Do your IT strategists have insights into the roadmap’s of these companies?
6. What workloads can be moved to SaaS now? The following are all real right now: Mail, Chat, Video Conferencing, File, Accounting, CRM, Workflow, Identity, Security, Project Management, Marketing, Field Service, Mobile Device Management, Environment Management, Support Desk, Space Management  …. and the list goes on.
7. Do you want to lower your appetite for Risk?
8. Would you like to have solutions that comply with International Security Standards and have the highest available levels of data resilience?
9. How much productivity could you gain by diverting your organisational Server Maintenance Spend to SaaS and Business Process Improvement?
10. Is you Software environment evergreen?
11. Do you care about the environment? Think about how much carbon your organisation produces running your IT vs how much the big boys with the best technology in the world produce? They invest heavily on reducing environmental impacts, Do you?

I think your seeing where I am going with this: Never ever invest in server infrastructure, perpetual software licencing, operating environment refreshes (except devices), Support 10 times the headcount with 1 Staff member. If you are in IT you had better start thinking Strategy and BPI. Your job is at risk if your not playing in SaaS. We have some SMB companies that are already 100% SaaS and enjoying the benefits” Here is a real world example of SaaS in action, we can more referrals on request. And please don’t hesitate to contact the Premis and Elite directly. www.elitefitout.com.au  and www.premis.com.au   Please visit their sites and read about the companies. In summary though,  Premis and Elite Fitout are successful companies with over 600 employees. They currently hold Government, Enterprise and SMB contracts Australia wide. After being hit by cryptolocker numerous times and going through multiple Vendors to help build environmental resistance with no success, Elite and Premis looked to Telstra and Apache to help. We introduced Rod (the CEO) to the concept of “Cloud Only”, he was sceptical but was at a point where his IT was hindering his business and needed a solution. We wanted a reliable solution so he could focus on his businesses rather than the pain that IT was presenting. We showed Rod a new way to consider things. We proved SaaS with o365 and his Mail workload. The world changed, he never experienced downtime or mail data loss again, the companies could securely access email anywhere anytime allowing his team to function 24hrs a day. Once we had Rods and the Board’s confidence we tackled the businesses next biggest problem and risk. “File”  We presented and POC’d the new paradigm of fully managed file and information. We migrated all Document Management to SharePoint and introduced the concept of managing the information rather than just the documents. The BPI process is continuing today, we are working with the team on everything from leave management to risk management. Workflows are helping systemise everything they do and ensure business compliance. Again SharePoint is securely accessible from anywhere, anytime helping the true mobility of the organisation. We worked with their ERP vendor and help the selection process of their new ERP by adding the requirement of SaaS to delivery.  The accounting workload is 100% SaaS Finally we looked at CRM, Identity, MDM and security. Using Microsoft’s totally integrated common data model across their whole stack we help move the entire platform to 100% SaaS. The success of going 100% can be seen everywhere: Solution uptime, Business Mobility, Functionality, BPI, Staff Satisfaction, Accountability, Auditability and ultimately Business Productivity.