10 Reasons To Dump Your On-Premise Ticketing System
Cloud computing is growing in popularity as an alternative to on-premise computing. Many organizations are adopting cloud solutions as a way to get out of the business of managing infrastructure and the IT components that go with it. This helps reinvest time and resources into more closely aligned customer-facing needs.
Many organizations in the past were concerned with cloud security but that has changed. The cloud is now more secure than ever. Many cloud vendors are adhering to government standards for security such as the stringent FedRAMP requirements. These capabilities help the industry with improving confidence in cloud platforms for their computing needs. Even without government requirements, cloud ticketing solutions can be an overall improvement in security versus on-premise solutions.
With security, not being a big concern for cloud service, there are 10 reasons that you should consider for dumping your on-premise ticketing system.
1. Need to improve business focus
This is probably the best reason for dumping your on-premise solution. The less industrialization i.e. back-end IT concerns you have the more you can focus on what really matters which is your front-end business outcomes. Cloud has made IT platforms (PaaS), IT infrastructure (IaaS) and IT software/applications (SaaS) commodities that can be considered plug and play into an organizations strategy.
Many disruptive business models are enabled because of the availability of cloud services, focus does not need to be on building physical IT but using virtual IT resources for business value. Time to market is decreased, overall business agility improved and customer focus is improved.
2. Cost of on-premise
There is lots of debate here about the cost of on-premise versus cloud. In some situations, the cloud can be more costly. Usually, these situations are related to cloud cost management. Many cloud vendors recognize this and are offering tools and flexible costing models to help with managing cloud usage and costs.
Organizations that use cloud solutions find that the user IT spending behaviours are similar for on-premise solutions. The user allocates cloud resources and capabilities; stops using the cloud resource but the company continue to pay for the usage. One of the values of a cloud ticketing system is on-demand resources and capacity, like renting a car, using what you need, then taking the car back after the demand period instead of keeping it parked and having to pay for usage. On-premise users usually look at IT resources like buying a car, the resources are depreciating and creating cost whether they use them or not creating no return on investment for the idle IT capabilities.
The cost metrics have to be looked at closely to determine the right fit for an organization. Cost of convenience or value of investment overall has to be considered. As mentioned in earlier business focus concern the cost may be well worth it when you consider improved return on investment and customer satisfaction instead of just total cost of ownership for a cloud ticketing solution.
3. Off-premise value realization
Cloud solutions are defined as having characteristics of being on-demand, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measurable resource usage. These characteristics are capabilities that drive organizations to move from on-premise ticketing solution to cloud-based solutions. Added to this list should be reduced manageability because of the cloud service provider capabilities for not only managing the physical IT infrastructure, platform and software but also providing additional services to support the management.
4. Management on-premise support resource and asset – (hardware, software, staff, physical buildings/rooms, utilities, maintenance)
Keeping an on-premise ticketing system makes you focus on managing the physical IT components, including the people talent needed. IT can add more value to the organization by shifting focusing and time to customer needs and business outcomes instead of managing the complexity of IT assets.
5. Risk management for disaster recovery
When managing risk you can accept the risk, avoid the risk, transfer the risk, mitigate the risk and exploit the risk. On-premise ticketing systems have multiple components that need to be managed for disasters. The unavailability of the database, physical equipment, etc. can have significant impacts on the ability to support customers. This can affect customer satisfaction and cause not only a lost of business capabilities but a lost of customers. Cloud ticketing solutions can help improve your risk management plan to insure business continuity for supporting your customers.
6. Improved mobility
Mobility is very important for the enablement of customer support in so many ways. Supporting a connected world requires mobility capabilities that give just in time responses. Ticketing systems have to be supported on multiple devices. The easiest way to do this today and keep up with the latest technologies and updates is to use a cloud ticketing solution.
7. Time to provision and implement for organization and market needs
A cloud ticketing system used out of the box can be in production in hours enabling a service desk analyst to support your customers. An on-premise solution may take week or months to deliver the same capability. Updates and maintenance are no longer the responsibility of the organization but now are the responsibility of the cloud ticketing service provider.
8. Improved reliability, availability and serviceability
Consistent performance without failure for a ticketing system is very important for the success of the organizational mission. Cloud ticketing systems improve the reliability, availability and serviceability challenges that are experienced with on-premise ticketing systems.
9. Unlimited capacity and on-demand growth
The characteristics of cloud ticketing systems easily increase capacity when the organization needs more capacity. On-premise solutions cannot respond to business needs as quickly as a cloud solution can. Not being responsive to capacity needs can result in missed business opportunities using your ticketing system.
10. Improved self-service for customers
Moving to a cloud-based ticketing system helps with improvement of self-service capabilities for your users. Portals for cloud-based ticketing systems are easier to configure and customized than ever before. Cloud ticketing providers provide portal templates that easily integrate with the ticketing solutions and also provide solutions to help with customization of your own portals. This helps with improved user experiences and overall happy customers. Solutions in this area are constantly being improved to support self-service and to integrate all functional areas of the organization.
Ticketing systems today are integrated into all business functions to support business continuity. Reliability of the systems is a must for organization to respond not only for user incidents and requests but also more as a central nerve centre for all cases that could occur. Cases such as emergency responses needed for security issues or any disaster. Cloud solutions are overall a better fit than on-premise to support organizational overall support needs.
With the many needed IT on-premise ticketing components to manage for supporting business services; organizations would be advised to revisit the way they think about how on-premise IT really supports their business. Agility, time to market, customer focus and others are benefits are achieved when using a reliable cloud ticketing systems.
Value is always in the eye of the individual organization when it comes to switching from on-premise to a cloud ticketing system. Depending on your ticketing system maturity and how you see value will help determine your desire to move from on-premise to a cloud ticketing system. As maturity increases through continual improvement of your ticketing system so does IT complexity. Instead of focusing on IT complexity the focus should be on improving business value. Organization should try to remove as much as possible the focus on managing IT assets and shift to focus on managing exceptional competitive service outcomes for their customers. Cloud ticketing systems can help improve the focus on business outcomes for your customers.
Freshservice has consistantly been ranking high in the cloud ticketing systems space. Take your Freshservice free trial here and know why!
Blog cover by Prasanna
