Recently, a report from McKinsey’s Silicon Valley Group "IT as a Service: From Build to Consume” found that there would be a massive acceleration in large enterprises migrating to the cloud. This year, it is expected that only 43% of companies will rely on traditional IT infrastructure – down from a whopping 77% that used it back in 2015.1
Moving to the cloud is a key trend, but for those working with sensitive asset information, the decision to move to the cloud can be difficult for various reasons.
Here are three reasons that Accruent customers have switched to the cloud:
1. Complexity changes things.
With an existing project, changes needed can range from small to large. For example, as an owner/operator of a capital-intensive production facility, you are faced with several necessary change projects each year, ranging from small plant modification to large capital-intensive projects. You have a good process in place for small changes and outside of your small team of contractors, but what about projects that have a larger scope? Alternatively, if you needed to build your production facility from start to finish, you would have several teams, discussions, assets, tasks and a lot of documentation that would come along with the collaboration involved in a complex, new project like that. Suddenly, the case for cloud becomes easier for organizations to get behind.
2. Collaboration, anytime, anywhere.
However, in both small/existing and bigger/new outside projects, involvement from other teams and contractors is inevitable and therefore needs to be managed and organized – making the case for cloud collaboration more relevant. With the cloud, documentation is organized and everyone is on the same page (or version) each time.
When an application is available in the cloud, your team can access it easily from anywhere at any time. The cloud offers real-time collaboration, so when one person adds markups to a plan or document, others will see these changes easily and be able to comment as well. Accruent’s cloud-based solution enables effective collaboration between owner-operators and their project networks and simplifies the management and control of engineering documents used in projects.
With the cloud, comes the rise of mobile applications. Typically, these applications are native to your phone or tablet and highly responsive and reactive. Behind the scenes, most of these applications rely on cloud-delivered APIs. This means your data is available to your employees practically anywhere and usable on any device they have on the job site. Accruent’s mobile app allows asset documents’ reviewers and approvers to take swift action on their workflow tasks, even when they are away from their desk. Our mobile app also helps users expedite project delivery through the convenience of mobile devices – leaving little room for delay in expected deliverables.
3. The case for cloud.
Typically, when you are using Software as a Service (SaaS) you rely solely on the application provider. But, when you are within the cloud on Accruent software, Accruent manages responsibilities between our cloud provider and ourselves. Our cloud provider offers us levels, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The IaaS level provides virtualized hardware managed by the cloud provider, but requires more management by the application. But the application has the highest flexibility in terms of software and services.
The PaaS level shifts the management responsibilities, so that the application does not rely on the management of things like Operating System patches and other updates which become the responsibility of the cloud provider. But the application loses some flexibility to install different software packages or manage updates differently.
We use a blend of both layers in our cloud applications but, in the end, as a SaaS provider to our customers, we take responsibility to manage the entirety of the application in conjunction with our cloud partner.