CIS 500 WEEK 8 Discussion

A small but fast-growing company has called you in as a consultant to help with their IT infrastructure. When they first started, they put their business data in the cloud and changed their business processes to fit their SaaS. Now, they want to know if they should customize their SaaS to fit their business processes, or keep changing their business processes to fit their SaaS.  

o Propose a set of 3-5 initial questions you would ask them to help you prepare your recommendation. Be sure to explain why you are asking each question. 

When it comes to a business putting their business data in the cloud, most business today are storing some of their data in the cloud or all their data. But they need to take into consideration the cloud storage along with the recovery of the data. Most businesses have a lot of electronic information they need to storage on any given day, so they need to think about the cost of this digital data storage. This is one of the reasons a business would use cloud storage, less expensive to storage data for the business. Before a business use cloud storage they have to take into consideration the data protection, backup, disaster-recovery and any deduplication services. A business could change their business processes to fit their SaaS, by ensuring there is no surprises with the process. The SaaS is there to delivery all the applications with a business over the internet as some type of service. SaaS is a web based software which is run by a SaaS provider’s servers. It’s a way to maintain the software, by letting the business access via the Internet, while the provider manage the access to the applications. This would also include the security, availability, and the performance of the application. SaaS business applications could be accessed by each user using a thin client via a web browser.

Initial questions for recommendation:

 Are you sure that you understand how to exactly implement the SaaS?

When it comes to a business implementing a new technology, they need to know if they’re working with a hardware based technology or is it the software service based technology. They just need to know why they’re implementing this new technology anyway, and why implement SaaS.

What would the business gain from implementing SaaS in the first place?

If a business implemented SaaS, it would benefit them by accomplishing their needs with the new technology. It would also help with the needs in accomplishing their goals they want to achieve with this software service.

Do the business have some type of service level agreement in place before signing a contract?

If the business had this service level agreement in place to could help define what the SaaS service entailed what the providers were offering the business. It would also tell the business what their consequences were if they failed to provide services with these standards. This is a great way to avoid any issues later by ensuring they’re getting what was paid for, that’s why a business should ask for this service agreement.

Before signing the agreement, did it meet all your needs along with the needs of the software vendors?

When it comes to the SaaS software vendors a business can find them all over the world, so their agreements needs to be different from other business. Business practices in the United States with their SaaS services are different when it comes to other countries like the UK. So everything needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to the SaaS.

What would be the IT support requirements when it comes to SaaS?

When it comes to the business IT support requirement, they need to consider the level of the IT professional they would need with their SaaS service provider. IT professional would also need to know what their expectations with the business SaaS would actually be, and would the business be able continue their operation with their existing workforce.

Reference:

http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/feature/Top-10-considerations-when-implementing-Software-as-a-Service

Top Management Concerns (20 points) 

A small but fast-growing company has called you in as a consultant to help with their IT infrastructure. When they first started, they put their business data in the cloud and changed their business processes to fit their SaaS. Now, they want to know if they should customize their SaaS to fit their business processes, or keep changing their business processes to fit their SaaS.  

o Propose a set of 3-5 initial questions you would ask them to help you prepare your recommendation. Be sure to explain why you are asking each question. 

What are your future plans?

Future plans of any business are very important in making day to day decisions as they help in achieving their business goals. Changing the process might affect how customers and users interface with the system and it isn’t generally recommended unless there are plans of introducing better services and thus making the change inevitable. Improvements are also a welcome at this stage. Customizing SaaS is applicable when you do not want to change a lot from the client side and generally improvements in the backend. Choosing the route to be taken is very important as it determines a lot.

What is the easiest to be implemented?

Though the easiest routes are not always the best, they are sometimes worth Taking when the process won’t be there for a long time and will be changing from time to time. Considering that the business is still growing, current processes and systems have to be optimized to accommodate the increasing customers. Current actions should be attractive to the users and potential users so that the business can grow.

What are the available resources?

Resources available will determine what will be changed as normally a lot of resources are required for major changes to the system. Changing the process will require training and that will cost a lot. Customizing SaaS to fit their process will be the option when resources are limited considering that the company is still small.