Issues/Lessons Learned:
Onboarding vendors: think about Exit strategy: how to get your data out at end of life
Think about Migration time you will need.
Cloud is easy to start, but so easy to mess up. More care should be taken with SaaS
Some cloud vendors may look well established, but it may not be the case in reality. Zoom for example. Sometimes we have to teach them.
There are just as many technical details in cloud solution as on prem solution.
Managing people’s expectations—harder to customize a SaaS solution. We have to fit their framework.
For on-prem you have more choice when to implement, on cloud you have to roll with the vendor.
PS: sometimes they still don’t meet expectation
VAR: often times they cost more do less for SaaS vendor
Hard to manage the SaaS vendors with non SAML integration
SaaS vendor sometimes can do it cheaper, better than established company.
Infrastructure used to run on prem is more
Mega vendor vs Small vendor: what is your experience
Working with big vendors are often time easier, other so much with the little vendors-often time they are not mature enough.
A bit of a treat-off: some small vendor are very responsive, quick, big vendors not so much.
Easier to shape a small vendor’s product offering.
Organizational maturity also matters a lot.
Big vendors have broader product line up, but might not take care of all the details.
Small vendors tend to invest a lot of energy for a customer, but later maintenance support may lag.
Work at Stanford: leverage in contract negotiation, but vendor may over promise.
Larger vendors: often times a part of their large applications is what we need, but the vendor may push you to adopt more products from them. They want to do everything for you.
Business problems: easier for people to look for technical solution to solve the business problems, and may end up with 2 systems and still left with the same business problem unsolved.
Where is the information really residing?
The vendors may not understand our security requirement in research environment.
Salesforce is accessible: but need to reaching out to the accessibility office of the vendor directly
Vendors don’t get accessibility: not a huge drive for vendors to be accessible.
Compliance: different priorities among peer institutions.
Looking at vendors data security SA 16 reports will give a lot info about the vendor
Add right to audit right to contract with vendor—will carry more weight than contract terms.
Vendors like us as we don’t talk to each other.
Collaboration with peer schools
How to measure success:
It does not blow up project, still employed; set a base line to compare the cloud solution to your existing or on prem solution; compare the cost, performance, etc; happy users
Risk to cloud based solution: lost of business analysis expertise/skills
Presentation of SaaS checklist slides at: uit.stanford.edu/cloud-transformation/choosing-solution
Consider doing a “How do we negotiate with vendors” –Suggest VM team offer some training
