President Univention North America, making sure you stay in control of your data, your company and your future.
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With the economy cooling, many companies have slowed their hiring or are reducing their headcount. The efficient management of budget, resources and time is replacing dealing with growing pains in many IT departments. That is the goal, but how can companies address those challenges?
It turns out that the trifecta of open interfaces, integration and open-source software can help you make the IT department a beacon of efficiency, almost like a lighthouse for leaner times. Those three things let companies give IT the importance it deserves in governing and managing a modern organization.
Take Them With You: Why Open Data Matters More Than Ever
In a time of economic growth and a free flow of investor capital, cloud services offered an excellent value for money. From start-ups to prominent players, providers offered an increasing array of features at attractive prices, a large part of which were subsidized by venture capital war chests.
Times are changing. With slowing economic growth, higher credit costs and more limited access to funding, many companies have begun to focus on their core business model. While we see this change most prominently in the consumer world, for example, with "Money in Excel," no provider guarantees their service will be available indefinitely. Take Google's announcement that it will start charging small businesses for its productivity suite, including email accounts, which has caused quite an outcry.
Consequently, portability matters. The ability to import and export your data out of a system can provide you with the crucial ability to move your data to a different provider. It enables your business to continue working, even if your previous service is hiking prices, cutting back its offering or going out of business altogether.
What's more, it gives you a say in where you want to spend your budget most efficiently and frugally. If a provider's policies and decisions do not align with your employer's governance, open interfaces can help you choose a new service and take your data elsewhere.
Escape From The Puzzle Palace: Open Interfaces Set You Free
Whether selecting multi-cloud strategies to mitigate provider downtime or choosing the best-in-class offering versus an all-in-one provider, today's IT world has become large and complex to manage. As a result, IT departments often have little time to perform complex integration projects or connect pieces of software not designed to work together.
The inability of IT systems to easily access your company's data all too often hampers interoperability, portability and accessibility. Yet, if your organization spends a considerable part of its budget producing data for production systems or customer contacts, why should someone else dictate how you can access that data?
Open interfaces to the rescue. They enable an organization to get its data into a system or out of it and interconnect multiple pieces of the complex puzzle we call IT. Without it, migrating between two cloud systems might require a company to copy data between the two manually. Doing so can have dire consequences, from driving up costs and lowering employee satisfaction to possibly dooming migrations from the start.
Without such interconnections, it might not be possible to centralize essential security functions, such as user management, password monitoring and log aggregation. After all, it's not cost-effective for any organization to build interfaces for computers to interact with the shiny interfaces we humans prefer.
Use The Fork: Open Source As An Insurance Policy
The best defense against a provider changing its offerings or going out of business is having control over the software's source code. MariaDB, LibreOffice and Nextcloud are three examples where a project was forked over a disagreement in the path forward. In the case of MariaDB, for instance, developers stepped in to keep a widely used tool going after a big provider such as Oracle had swooped in and acquired the popular MySQL database.
Open source provides a second tangible benefit beyond protecting against unpleasant surprises. Often, in-house staff or local service companies can develop extensions or non-breaking improvements to the software. These changes help better adapt code to the company's current needs. Sharing them will also boost name recognition and goodwill within a broader community. It's a halo effect of coding that comes in handy during a talent squeeze. When hiring patterns swing between bursts of hiring and freezes, this store of accrued goodwill can tilt the scales and make a talented candidate decide to work for your IT department.
Weathering A Downturn By Keeping Your Options Open
In an economic downturn, operating efficiently and focusing on future growth are often the two most important differentiators between organizations that get ahead and those that barely get by. Choosing openness and interoperability enables an IT department to build the best system for a given set of resources, reduce running costs and protect its assets against an ever-changing landscape.
Keeping your options open, then, gives your team peace of mind as it allows everyone in the company to focus on growth instead of dreading the moment when it's their turn to turn off the lights or unplug the servers.
A more fluid IT model that allows you to switch between offerings as the need arises and focus on enabling the rest of the team to keep working is especially critical when budgets dry up. That's the moment of truth when everyone has to be at their peak performance to make it through a crisis. After all, don't we all want to be the hero who saves the sinking ship, not the one arguing over whether we hit an iceberg?
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