John Q. Todd Sr. Business Consultant, PMP –

Ah the good old days when you could write a few lines of code, amaze your friends, and maybe crash a few PCs on the showroom floor at our local Sears or Radio Shack. You were having fun and living stress free.

Fast forward a little and now providers of Maximo Software as a Service (SaaS) want to assist you in bridging the gap between your in-house Maximo to instances in the cloud. This, and possibly making connections between your other cloud-hosted applications to/from Maximo.

Having your enterprise applications (and data!) hosted out in the cloud is no laughing matter. And it has become so common within these last few years that you can’t help but start taking it seriously.

SaaS requires careful attention to elements such as security approaches, interconnection options, development access, updates/upgrades, data ownership/backup, disaster recovery, and the list goes on.

There are a lot of things that keep you up at night regarding your in-house servers and applications. So the idea of moving everything into the cloud may cause some hesitation.

Yet, the push to the cloud is intriguing as it takes the worries of the infrastructure, backup and restore, and often upgrades and patches out of your hair. You’d now have agreements and contracts in place to cover these things vs. you having to build and maintain the infrastructure. It turns into a contracts management activity vs. technical activity.

Cloud solutions quite often enable a provider to bundle applications and functions together into a package to your benefit. One licensing scheme for access to a suite of apps for your user community. Often these application suites contain not only business applications, but also development applications that augment or enhance what is already provided in the anchor application such as Maximo.

Not to say that there are not challenges with migrating to the cloud. Coordinating with your provider for outages, maintenance, connectivity and security are new wrinkles for you to plan for. Enhancements to the software driven by your organization may now require a few extra steps to implement.

Do your research. Find a provider who not only understands your enterprise application, your industry, but also the cloud hosting environment. Don’t forget about their experience with integrating across cloud environments and applications. Put all these together into a well written script and you can relax again.