The COVID-19 pandemic forced enterprises into a full work-from-home mode practically overnight. There was no time to test, evaluate and decide. We were thrown into this “new normal” where anything that can be done remotely is being done remotely.

“We’re being forced into the world’s largest work-from-home experiment and, so far, it hasn’t been easy for a lot of organizations to implement,” says Saikat Chatterjee, Senior Director at Gartner.

This “new normal” is testing every enterprise’s agility to its core. Two questions are key for every enterprise:

• Can we continue working?
• How do we ensure continuity of operations during the pandemic?

The stakes are high as enterprises struggle to adapt and minimize any losses in money, reputation, clients, employees, etc.

With a significant growth of interest for remote work, enterprises are scrambling to find ways to adapt their existing legacy systems to enable their workforce to work from home. The chatter around work from home is so high that it’s incomparable to any previous time, as the chart below shows. This study points out that “work from home” was a subject of 423 transcribed conversation in public companies:

I looked up his position title on LinkedIn and it just says “Senior Director” so we don’t need to include the advisory bit  [JS1] [JS1]

Technology plays the leading role in this digital transformation drama. And, according to Gartner’s research, a high 54% of HR leaders indicate poor technology and infrastructure as the main problem for efficient work from home implementation.

The challenges of legacy technology in a work from home setting

The first challenge that users of legacy systems face is their inability to provide work from home capabilities at an enterprise-wide scale. Simon Migliano, the head of research at Top10VPN.com once commented about enterprises’ abilities to provide VPN access to their entire workforce: “We know of at least one company whose VPN capacity is 8,000 users…Now, they have over five times as many employees trying to connect, with predictably frustrating results.”

According to an estimation of Rob Smith, another Gartner analyst, around one-third of enterprises were without proper equipment and knowledge to work from home. Another one-third had no plan at all and had never planned ahead to create any kind of a telecommuting strategy…

Many of these enterprises who didn’t proactively update their systems and corporate culture for the growing work from home trend found themselves in a challenging situation. Their IT departments needed to quickly adapt existing, usually outdated, on-premise software solutions that were never built to provide telecommuting capabilities.

These on-premise enterprise content management solutions were built with the preconception that there will be people close by to monitor and manage infrastructure, processes, documents, etc. Such proprietary systems needed the physical presence of people, so they could work efficiently, reliably, and securely.

Security is another challenge for enterprises using outdated systems. This is especially the case in regulated industries where workers go through security routines to get to their desks. Now, with the work from home culture, all those physical security measures account for nothing as enterprises are forced to grant remote access to sensitive data and processes without a tried and tested security setup.

For all these problems, the “government, legal, insurance, banking and healthcare are all great examples,” says Sumir Karayi, CEO and founder of 1E. “Many companies and organizations in these industries are working on legacy systems and are using software that is not patched. Not only does this mean remote work is a security concern, but it makes working a negative, unproductive experience for the employee.”

That leads us to another challenge: workforce productivity. The loss of productivity in enterprises that were not prepared for remote work is due to a lack of modern technology and a lack of employee training. An outdated enterprise infrastructure coupled with an untrained workforce for a work from home setting means enterprises found themselves in unknown territory with no battle plan.

Employees in unprepared enterprises are now juggling work and life challenges without any prior training. We’ll be reviewing these workforce challenges in the next blog post. For the time being, we’ll keep our focus on the technology side of the problem.

Proprietary and on-premise solutions should be replaced with modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

Why is SaaS the solution for enterprise management?

Secure data access from anywhere for the entire workforce is one of the key reasons why enterprises should consider cloud solutions. Picking the right SaaS solution coupled with proper training can lead to productivity growth and employee satisfaction. Consequently, this will result with improved customer satisfaction. Enterprises that have planned and prepared for a work from home culture can, in fact, see solid growth during this COVID-19 period.

In general, SaaS companies and providers are offering a variety of enterprise solutions, such as:

• enterprise content management (ECM),
• business process management (BPM),
• customer relationship management (CRM),
• document management,
• case management,
• payroll and billing processing,
• human resource management

Today, according to 451 Research, the cloud is the new mainstream, with approximately 90% of organizations surveyed using some type of cloud service. In 2019, around 60% of all workloads were running on some form of a hosted cloud service. This represents a huge rise from 45% just a year ago. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud vendor with a 32% market share with an annual growth of 41%.

According to the IDG survey, 89% of companies use some kind of SaaS services. In another study, Cisco was cited as stating that by 2021, approximately 75% of all cloud workloads and compute instances will be SaaS. The leading reason for SaaS adoption across enterprises are:

• ability to work outside of the office (42%).
• ease of disaster recovery (38%),
• flexibility (37%),
• offloading IT support (36%)

The rate of SaaS adoption by enterprises has only accelerated because of the pandemic. At what rate, we’re yet to see. We should see a faster adoption pace as more enterprises move off of proprietary solutions to SaaS solutions simply because the old systems don’t provide the flexibility required by the new normal enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

SaaS benefits beyond productivity

SaaS is quickly becoming a reliable choice for private enterprises and government organizations. Enterprise executives are considering SaaS during this pandemic more than ever as they seek to adjust their organizations to a work from home culture and ensure staff efficiency.

It’s not only efficiency, though. According to the Rackspace study, from 1,300 surveyed companies, 88% of the enterprises with cloud services have experienced cost savings. Additionally, 56% reported an increase in profits.

Let’s look at a few other obvious benefits enterprises and agencies can gain from using SaaS solutions over the more traditional on-premise approach:

• Reduction of the hardware cost

When using SaaS, there will be no need to maintain the existing server infrastructure on-premise. Cutting out the cost of hardware purchases and maintenance is especially important for fast-growing enterprises. New hardware can be bulky, expensive and demand special treatment and HVAC improvements. SaaS-based cloud solutions overcomes these issues. Furthermore, the cost of repairing and replacing hardware components is now passed on to the vendors to worry about.

• Reduction of electricity and real estate expenses

The reduction of on-premise hardware will directly and positively affect the organization’s electricity and real estate expenses. Enterprises that adopt a SaaS solution for their ECM needs will free up real estate in their buildings, cut electricity costs to power that IT equipment and reduce their HVAC bills as there would be no need to climatize large rooms full of heat-producing equipment.

• IT Support staff savings

With offloading the needed hardware concerns to the SaaS supplier, enterprises and agencies will no longer need a considerable workforce that maintains those systems. Routine maintenance, patching, hardware and software upgrades are all part of the SaaS offer, and this can be a considerable amount that companies save every month.

• Reduce the time and cost for implementation and training

The deployment of a new cloud-based solution is considerably faster than any other conventional system implementation. While an on-premise solution would take months of work to set up the infrastructure, install the software and do internal training, a SaaS solution is set up in a few hours. Of course there will be exceptions to thissince some enterprises may need customization to an existing SaaS solution. But, all customization would be handled by a much larger IT team who can deploy a solution much faster. Most SaaS providers already have ready-made libraries of support materials like manuals or how-to videos, which makes training a self-service task for employees.

•  Flexible cost of ownership

The typical SaaS pricing model is pay-as-you-go. Sometimes, there will be an initial setup fee if customizations are needed. After the setup, organizations will be looking at a relatively small fee each month, depending on the size of their workforce and features/resources they use. This pricing model is flexible, and it offers different ways for organizations to reduce overhead:

1. First, the enterprise does not face a steep annual license With SaaS, there is no such thing as a software license. You rent the service and pay a small fee per user, per month.
2. Second, this pay-as-you-go software can be canceled at any time. For example, if a pandemic happened. Or monthly fees can be reduced accordingly if and when the enterprise decides to reduce the workforce. The flip side, of course, is also the ease of scaling up the workforce. The only expense here would be the few minutes needed to create a new user profile for the employee, and they’d be ready to start using the software and the vendor-produced training materials.
3. Third, enterprise SaaS solutions usually come with a utilization fee. For example, this means that enterprises won’t face fixed fees for data storage or computing power if they don’t use these services that much… This helps enterprises avoid fixed expenses of additional hardware that they would only use in peak periods. Cloud infrastructure providers, like AWS, are enabling SaaS providers to get the maximum value from server farms, and this benefit is clearly transferable to the end user, which in this case is the enterprise or organization using a SaaS solution.

This is clearly a very short list of extra benefits besides employee productivity and employee satisfaction improvements. As stated in the statistics above, enterprises and organizations are aware of the benefits of cloud-based solutions. This is why more and more of them are replacing proprietary and on-premise solutions with SaaS solutions. The pandemic only expedited this migration to the cloud as the work from home mode is now the only viable way for some organizations to continue operations.

The final step: SaaS-based Technology implementation

It used to be the case that the most prepared organizations in terms of software and hardware were the most resistant to cloud-based solutions. Their upfront investment made the cloud idea a bit redundant. But, times have changed. As Rick Holland, CISO and vice president of strategy at Digital Shadows, stated for Threatpost: “One of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 will likely be increased zero trust adoption that further embraces cloud services, eliminates VPNs, and enables employees to work from anywhere.”

Continuity of Operations must be provided. Enterprises will offload everything on the cloud: software, data storage, operations, processing power, users management, etc. Before the pandemic, Gartner estimates 50% of government organizations across the US were using cloud solutions. This number will rise even faster during a pandemic as SaaS solutions are already built with remote work in mind.

The crucial step of implementation of SaaS-based solutions is finding a reliable technology partner. This partner would ideally be a company that already has the know-how and routines in place to perform critical data migration and workflow creation processes using reliable technology… A company, which is recognized for its expertise, reliability, and ability to work under pressure.

Armedia LLC is a CMMI Level 3 company that provides a niche focus in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technical and advisory services. We are a proven provider in delivering modern, flexible, robust, and scalable solutions to federal/state/local government, as well as commercial enterprises. With 18 years of deep ECM experience, our skilled team with industry certifications has helped deploy hundreds of ECM solutions. In just the past year, Armedia has actively supported over 20 initiatives in the government and commercial market.

For more info, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic, and we’d appreciate you sharing this blog post on your social media.