Its time to bring your project management from on-premise to the Cloud
By: Andrew Gold
Tags: Software, On Prem, Project Management, Cloud, Workflow

It may have taken some by surprise when Atlassian announced that it would be sunsetting its on-premise version of its JIRA Software by ceasing server product sales in February of 2021 and ending server support in February of 2024.

But those with an eye towards innovation saw a movement towards the cloud coming for quite some time now, and Atlassian is prepared to shed those who aren’t prepared to follow.

Before we jump into the benefits of moving your project management to the cloud, let’s first understand why you’re likely currently hosting your tool locally.

On Premise Incentives

There are up to three key reasons your company likely operates with an on premise solution:

Security

Ownership and Control

Infrastructure

Security

Generally the chief concern with cloud hosting, on premise solutions keep security squarely in your control as there’s no third party intermediary between your employees and the software.

Ownership and Control

A one-time purchase of software licenses allows your organization to maximize the value of the purchase by supporting the software on your own arrangement. Additionally, the configuration, data, and system updates are entirely in your control.

Infrastructure

That you’re hosting your own project management software on premise means you organization has already engaged in the up front capital expenditure as well as the necessary hires to implement and maintain the system. To be frank, it’s quite possible that this capital commitment came before the widespread availability (and trust in) the cloud.

Transition Trepidation

Moving to the cloud means your organization will need to loosen its own grasp of the Security, Ownership, and Infrastructure that currently keeps your project management (and likely other company-wide softwares) afloat. Such a transition can be costly and may call the necessity of certain positions of your organization into question once the transition has concluded.

So then the big question persists: Why make the leap to the cloud from your on premise solution? Truth is, many of the reasons that your organization cited as reasons to be on premise are addressed with grace through a cloud solution.

The Benefits of the Cloud

Adopting the Cloud and the providers who utilize it is admittedly an extension of trust in other organizations, but this trust is often warranted. A third party’s ability to optimize their service for a segment of your business generally improves the quality and lowers the cost of that service.

Security

Cloud Security is increasingly becoming safer than on premise security as cloud providers routinely invest heavily in the latest security measures to ward off a wide range of threats. It’s unlikely that the average organization will have the bandwidth to invest in on premise hardware for security measures at the rate of, say, AWS, so trusting cloud providers with modernized security is becoming less of a leap of faith and more of a reasonable expectation. This is just one of many instances where you can limit expenditure and strain on internal IT positions and infrastructures.

Ownership and Control

Cloud-based softwares are far more accessible than ones deployed on premise. Additionally, the burden to maintain, update, and optimize performance for scalability is also shifted to the software provider, allowing you to engage with an ideal experience of the program without needing to lean on your IT infrastructure to perfect the solution internally.

Infrastructure

There’s no dodging the fact that your organization has made a considerable investment in its on premise hosting solution, but a sunk cost is a dangerous fallacy when trying to estimate innovation for the future. Cloud-based softwares come with predictable costs in the form of an operational expenditure. The responsibilities of uptime, energy costs, disaster recovery are mantled by the provider as part of the arrangement as well. In this way, you’re safe to assume that cloud-hosted solutions shake out to being less expensive over time as essentially everything required to rollout, maintain, and update the solution is no longer your burden to shoulder.

An Opportunity for Innovation

If your organization is looking to move its project management solution from on premise to the cloud, it’s also likely a good time to assess and reconsider the management tool your company is employing to spearhead planning and execution efforts. Let’s identify three core ways to evaluate a software the same way we did to evaluate the benefits of the cloud:

Ease of Use

Organizational buy-in on a tool is tremendously important, as it ultimately determines if your company is maximizing the value of the solution they’ve selected. An easy to use solution helps bridge the gap between your employees using a tool as part of an organizational mandate and using a tool because it actually facilitates reaching objectives by making daily workflows easier. Modern PM solutions incentivize usage by weaving more instances of collaboration into them so that they become live working environments instead of “update hubs” that simply track what’s already been done.

Flexibility

The more organizational workflows that a solution can gracefully solve, the better, as it comes with a bevy of benefits. First, this will require your team to juggle fewer subscription engagements across fewer vendors. Secondly, cross-departmental workflows are facilitated as they do not require integrations between tools, or even worse, moving data outside of these tools altogether. The drawback to consider with all-in-one flexible workspaces is that drawing meaningful insights across the platform can be a challenge, which lends to our third point.

Scalability

It’s imperative that the selected solution fits your organization both today and tomorrow, meaning it must have the flexibility to cater to many workflows while still scaling in an such a way that does not result in an organizational nightmare. Striking a balance between flexibility and scalability is arguably the key challenge that separates the top-tier workflow solutions from ones that thrive in the hands of a certain department. Consider how your management may glean meaningful insights across two or more departments with entirely different workflows to determine a solution’s cross-departmental scalability.

Final Thoughts

Moving your organization to the cloud is no small feat, but it’s a vital transformation that is beginning to look like a “when, not if” transition. What feels like a leap of faith is coming more of an acknowledgement of the ability for cloud vendors to optimize their service more effectively than your organization can internally.

The same can be said about workflow solutions. What feels like a stretch in unifying more of your organization around fewer solutions will eventually be seen as an undeniable leap towards scalable productivity instead of forcing too many square pegs into round holes. That said, selecting the best solution as part of your digital transformation is a major crux in the success in the future of an organization’s workflows.