SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!

I had an interesting situation last night that threw me back in time to my IT support days many moons ago – I had to be a firefighter, and I didn’t like it one bit. I had discovered that major changes to a web property that we had implemented earlier in the day had reverted back to an earlier state, and since the changes were applied directly to the vendor’s content management system, we had no rollback capabilities. Granted, the total time that could have been lost was only a few hours which is why we didn’t pay much attention to backups or other safeguards, but at a time when this company is going through a significant growth phase, every hour counts.

I was able to get back to the office, locate a cached version of the page in my Chrome browser, and reconstruct the content in about 45 minutes. This is where I came to an important realization about the impact of cloud computing on the IT organization – early in my career, this situation would have given me a huge adrenaline rush and made me feel like a hero. My boss would have praised me for my dedication and my troubleshooting ability. I would have been on a high until the next fire had to be put out. But this is a different time. These 45 minutes came at a significant opportunity cost – missing my son’s baseball practice. They also came on top of an already long and intense day.  And in the grand scheme of things, they were 45 minutes that were not value adding.

It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought about how this 45-minute episode is by no means unique, and happens tens of thousands of times each day, across companies of all sizes. Thousands of hours each day are spent by IT resources feeling like they’re doing a great job putting out fires, but in the end contributing to little more than operational overhead. This is where cloud computing becomes a force multiplier – companies from small businesses to global corporations can leverage cloud services for exponential gains in operational effectiveness by shifting IT resources from firefighters to roles that provide direct value to the business. Managing servers (“boxes”), software versions, operating system patches, databases, etc. gets shifted outside of the walls of the company, and thus outside of the realm of internal IT; those headaches become someone else’s…someone else who specializes in providing a specific service better than anyone else in the world, including the internal IT staff. By shifting to cloud services, internal IT can focus on tightly integrating technology with business architecture, rapidly supporting new business opportunities with on-demand customer-facing systems that reduce the process friction that customers experience when doing business with you, and most importantly…taking all of that creative energy that was once spent in crisis mode and applying it to value-creating functions and initiatives.