.png)
The world of work has undergone a shift that has never been experienced before. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in the age of virtual work which is unlikely to change for some time in the future. It has also acted as a catalyst for organizations to accelerate their digitization drive to enable their workforce and mitigate the business challenges caused by the pandemic.
As organizations look for opportunities to improve collaboration and innovation, the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic has also deemed that they curtail unnecessary expenses while making smart technology investments to stay ahead of the curve in an ever-competitive landscape.
What organizations need?
Amongst the several challenges organizations are looking to mitigate, some pressing ones can be highlighted as follows –
Ensuring business continuity and productivity
As the workforce moves into a remote and virtual setup, organizations have to make sure that there are no disruptions in information technology (IT) services as such disruptions can have a negative impact on business continuity, employee productivity, and revenues. Organizations, therefore, need to ensure access to critical data and applications and that outages do not impact business continuity. They also need to ensure robust Disaster Recovery (DR) readiness and become more agile to enable change.
Scalability to meet the demands of an evolving tech landscape
With the evolving technology landscape, organizations need to improve their agility to keep pace with these changes. They need the capability to develop, test, and deploy applications faster, and ensure that they can increase or reduce their IT resources to meet changing demands.
Scalability and elasticity are the need of the hour to respond to changing workload demands. Along with accommodating immediate, variable shifts in demand, organizations need to facilitate stable, longer-term growth. Of course, all this has to be enabled keeping in mind the stringent budgets during these challenging times.
Manage the complexity of the IT and tools ecosystem
As organizations are forced to work with fewer resources, navigating the complexities of the IT and tools ecosystem becomes hard.
Enabling easy updates and upgrades and managing software maintenance become an indelible part of the IT narrative. Organizations look for more cost-effective ways to enable these. IT departments need the right support to manage the complexity of the IT and tools ecosystem so that their resources can be freed up to focus on strategic initiatives.
Enable innovation
Remote or virtual, no matter what the work environment, innovation cannot stop. Organizations have to make sure that the enablers of innovation, such as information and collaboration, remain unhindered even as operations move to a virtual avatar.
Organizations can innovate by expanding application features while improving ease-of-use or creating tailored customer journeys. They can innovate in discovering the right avenues that enable collaboration across teams and increase their agility to rapidly prototype, develop, and deploy new applications, reach new customers, or expand into new markets.
Improve costs
In these volatile market conditions and economy, to achieve cost-saving, most organizations are looking at optimizing OPEX while reducing CAPEX. They are evaluating ways to reduce upfront licensing costs for software, high maintenance costs, and almost prohibitive hardware costs and lowering the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to keep the lights on and burning.
Ensure security
As organizations look at strengthening their technical investments, they also have to make sure that security remains uncompromised and that breaches, bugs, and cyberattacks do not impact data and business continuity.
The Way Ahead
The above seem like formidable challenges. However, just like everything else, the solution to these challenges lies in the technology itself. The SaaS model has emerged as an enabler of efficiencies and cost savings that can help organizations move along the path of profitability.
With the onset of the pandemic, organizations are looking for opportunities to reduce IT cost and complexity, ensure availability and business continuity, increase agility, and accelerate their ability to develop and deploy business applications rapidly. And SaaS helps organizations achieve this with ease while optimizing OPEX.
Here is a look at how SaaS helps organizations navigate the above-mentioned challenges
- Organizations can ensure business continuity with existing workflows help in maintaining productivity using SaaS. Using the cloud, organizations can continue production and distribution operations and enable friction-free experiences by ensuring application, process, workflow, and data availability.
- The SaaS model allows organizations to reduce upfront costs in the form of license fees, investments in infrastructure, or implementation costs. Software then becomes an operational expense and not a capital expense.
- With SaaS, organizations also do not need to spend on prohibitive hardware and infrastructure costs. Eliminating the hardware from the equation further enables cost savings as organizations don’t need to spend IT resources on hardware maintenance. Research shows that those who utilize the cloud spend only 7% of their total IT spending on data centers as compared to 16.6 percent of IT budgets of organizations that don’t.
- SaaS also enables a faster time to value as there is no time wasted on-site preparation or lead time for hardware delivery and physical loading of the software.
- Flexible, pay-as-you-go payment models further make SaaS a prudent option that enables cost savings.
- SaaS helps organizations harness the power of data at lower costs by moving data storage to the cloud. The scalability, backup and disaster recovery features and on-demand storage service reduce the TCO. It also helps organizations streamline data-intensive processes and pay only for what they use.
- Organizations can increase competitiveness and accelerate time-to-market with SaaS as managed service providers have extensive experience in infrastructure and application management and are well equipped to support enterprises. Leveraging AIOps delivered by data center/Cloud providers, organizations can check, maintain, and monitor application deployments with ease.
- The SaaS model also frees up organizations from the burden of managing the complexity of IT responsibilities. The day to day operations of maintenance and upgrades handled by the managed services provider. With vendors shouldering the burden of IT resource management, managing updates and upgrades and maintenance needs of software becomes easier. Scarce IT resources can then be applied to focus on strategic IT initiatives for the organization. A recently conducted survey shows that 46% of managed IT service users have cut their annual IT costs by 25 percent or more. 62% of those surveyed said they plan to increase their commitment to managed services.
- SaaS also helps in navigating the complexities of the compliance and regulatory landscape. Remote access makes it easier to implement updates and upgrades easily and ensures that applications and data are up-to-date both technically and functionally.
- SaaS gives businesses immense scalability and helps them deploy applications and backbone systems faster. It gives organizations the capacity to transform parts of the architecture to build in more flexibility to lower fixed operating costs. Additionally, automating business processes based on robotics, workflow automation, and Artificial Intelligence to drive enhanced efficiency becomes easier with SaaS.
Codefactori to the rescue
Cost savings and optimized OPEX are compelling reasons to adopt the cloud and the SaaS model. It is also hard to ignore the other benefits of agility, easier scalability, and improved security. Codefactori is our solution to help organizations leverage all the benefits of SaaS to help them stay on the path of productivity. Codefactori helps organizations remain free of issues like outages, restrictions, and other obstacles that stifle productivity.
A fully managed and hosted solution, Codefactori helps organizations:
- Eliminate capital expenditure costs of hardware, data centers, and payroll for regular maintenance and upgrades.
- Scale seamlessly and work efficiently without worries about managing the infrastructure.
- Facilitate customizations of the tools’ ecosystem including integrations, custom workflows, automated post functions, and triggers in accordance with the business needs.
- Ensure data security with enterprise-grade security and the highest level of protection
- Guarantee 99.95% uptime with 30 min RPO and 2 hours RTO
The current pandemic and its impact reinforce the reasons to choose SaaS to meet the needs of the new world of work. In such a time, SaaS helps in maintaining business as usual and also enhances resilience by helping organizations stay prepared to navigate the changing demands with ease.
Move ahead in your SaaS journey and accelerate your digitizing initiatives.
