While cloud-based resources have reduced the up-front costs for new organizations to deploy resources, organizations that have already invested in infrastructure should be mindful of the value they’ve already got in place, and search for solutions that can be deployed with it. While this seems common sense enough, some organizations, swept away by cloud messaging, ignore the substantial value they have at their disposal and send what can be critically sensitive data off to a cloud-based solution. For smaller organizations, say less than 50 employees, a cloud-based solution may make sense. Yet there are important questions to ask your cloud vendor, such as: Where will my data be stored? In what geographic and political/jurisdictional realm will it reside? How will it be secured, and how will our intellectual property be protected?
Another consideration is that some cloud-based solutions, while offered free of charge, have a revenue model based upon harvesting the information you store for analytics. If you’ve developed efficient workflows, you might want to keep them as a competitive advantage rather than leaving them open for a service provider to analyze, package, and re-sell to potential competitors. This raises questions such as: Who owns my data? What are they allowed to do with my data?
See iSupport’s new whitepaper Identifying and Automating Core Business Practices to find out more about cloud considerations when searching for a help desk solution.
