A company could do similar checks with Cloud-based vendors, but the analysis may be even more tricky. First, how to evaluate a Cloud-based vendor's ability to scale is a skill few IT professionals today probably possess.
More importantly, "scalability" is now not a attribute specific to your situation and software instance - how well the system performs at peak period heavily depends on the vendor's ability to manage its infrastructure over time, how many other users are also stressing that infrastructure, and other issues.
For example, if a vendor has more than one data center, how well it plans and manages across those facilities could enhance or detract from performance, says Mark Fralick, SCDigest Technology Editor and president of ROI Solutions.
"If a Cloud-based software vendor doesn't get its geo-planning right, that could lead to some real performance issues," Fralick says.
All this also raises issues about who really has the control of the software system and performance.
"I am a bit of a control freak in terms of the software," Fralick says. "With Cloud computing, the application "plumbing" is really out of a user's control. You can almost always rather quickly deal with problems in the application itself before too long, but if there are problems in the plumbing, that can be "lights out." The question is whether you want to give up that control for mission critical applications and how well you understand whether the Cloud-based vendor really will be able to deliver on the back end."
He notes that a given Cloud-based vendor might scale and perform well with say 20 companies using the system, but falter later as the number of other customers increases over time, depending on the vendor's investment in infrastructure, technical skills and back-end Cloud management software.
He says that for some applications that are relatively low intensity, customers probably don't have much to worry about from a Cloud-based approach.
But for more intensive applications in terms of processing and transaction throughput, companies really need to decide if they want to give up most of the control of the back end, and to really understand how potential SaaS vendors can deliver scalability both currently and over time.
"You have to really decide how much control you are willing to lose," Fralick says.
The bottom line: supply chain managers need to be at least modestly knowledgeable about these issues and trade-offs, understand that not all Cloud or SaaS-based vendor are really the same, and push IT to really investigate control and architecture issues that sometimes get overlooked in on-demand deployments.
Do all this technical stuff with Cloud and SaaS make your head spin? Do you think the back end capabilities really are important? Do you think control issues are worth thinking about? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback button below.
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