- SaaS apps like Workday have helped businesses drive new strategies and reduce the speed of implementations.
- Configuring SaaS apps comes with daunting challenges like keeping up with constant update cycles and operational inefficiencies.
- Configuration Management System (CMS) converts SaaS configuration into actionable data for the customer.
- Leveraging a CMS with your SaaS apps can reduce the time, effort, and resources needed so your business can focus on more crucial initiatives.
SaaS ERP applications such as Workday, SuccessFactors, and ServiceNow have shifted how we view enterprise applications. Instead of coding to a custom solution, we now follow industry standards and configure our needs.
This has helped reduce the implementation speed, drive continuous business strategies, and monetize the investment. SaaS vendors can deliver new features and functionalities that support your business needs.
Challenges with Configuration
1. Lack of control over the code.
Because the code that configuration is set up upon belongs to the SaaS vendor, any change to the code base by the vendor could impact your configuration. To stay afloat, customers typically have to do numerous regressions testing of the configuration throughout the year.
2. Overwhelming update cycles.
Keeping up with the continuous internal updates and features can become overwhelming, especially since no team typically manages just one application or environment. So, most teams don’t have the time or experience to perform a thorough change impact analysis for internal changes. This lack of change impact analysis can create risks or issues in the future.
3. Tedious support tasking.
Performing operational tasks can be time-consuming, especially since these SaaS apps are generally not focused on delivering robust tools for operational efficiencies. SaaS vendors often expect “this will all work out.” Unfortunately, it is not the case, given the constant juggling of supporting these SaaS apps.
What is a SaaS Configuration Management System (CMS)?
Configuration Management System (CMS) is not a new concept in the IT space. CMS is considered to manage a set of rules and attributes that IT uses for the software and servers. This helps control the implementation, integration, and configuration delivery across all the environments with minimal effort. Products like Git and Docker help with code configuration management.
The same concept can be true for SaaS applications. While the backend (software code, servers, etc.) is managed and controlled by the SaaS vendor, the front-facing application is based on customer-specific configuration. It requires a similar set of activities that one would expect in the IT organization: implementation, integration, and delivery/migration.
An essential feature of any Configuration Management System is converting the SaaS configuration into actionable data for the customer that is automatically managed and continuously monitored.
Optimization of the SaaS application is an equally powerful feature of CMS solutions. By performing automated configuration analysis powered by intelligence and best practices, a customer can ensure the SaaS application adheres to SaaS vendor, industry, and internally defined standards. Empowering the customers with analytical insights and recommendations allows the customer to focus on future needs and innovations.
Benefits of using a Configuration Management System with SaaS apps
Let’s see how a CMS would solve the problems defined earlier to deliver better and faster results.
1. Reduce time and effort for every release.
A CMS can centralize the release notes for the end customers for all the SaaS vendors. Some CMS systems, like SimplrOps, can also perform impact analysis based on the release notes to determine accurate and targeted impacts and new features that matter to the customers. This can help drive focused testing and significantly reduce time and effort for each release.
2. Reduce future risks.
By digitizing the configuration into actionable data, a Configuration Management System can deliver a robust search functionality to provide accurate impact results across all configurations. The result significantly reduces future risks and issues with historical insights into change and related impacts.
3. Fill in operational gaps.
Any Configuration Management System focuses on reducing the effort required to manage one or multiple SaaS vendors. Solutions such as configuration compare, security analysis, and continuous monitoring with insights and recommendations are ways that CMS, such as SimplrOps, can fill in the operational gaps in the SaaS vendor space.
In Conclusion
Businesses are becoming more reliant on SaaS solutions that solve specific challenges and can be part of their future growth and expansion. Now customers need a way to stabilize, simplify and drive operational efficiencies to manage their expanding SaaS footprint. Customers want to focus on new feature adoption rather than just trying to keep the lights on.
A Configuration Management System is built to solve these exact challenges and connect the customer and the SaaS vendor.
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