For many software companies, the move to AWS was meant to address a particular need. Perhaps you wanted to support global growth and give yourself more ability to scale, maybe you needed to have more control over costs and consumption, or to provide your users with the innovative and future-focused solution they were requesting after they made their move to the cloud.
No matter the reason, for a lot of ISVs today, the initial migration to the cloud was built around one demand, which can often make it hasty or less planned out than ideal. As well as this, it doesn’t take into account the pioneering advancements made in the area of SaaS enablement in recent years. Instead of creating your cloud migration plan based on a strong holistic roadmap for success, you find yourself on the cloud with questions about what your next steps should be.
The truth about building a robust SaaS offering is that there is no one size fits all. The strongest roadmaps for making changes to or building your SaaS solution will come from both incorporating business and technological best practices, allowing you to move forward with equal strength behind each of these essential areas. If your cloud progress has stalled, or you’re not seeing the expected benefits for your customers or your company, here are some points to consider.
Innovate Easier with the Use of DevOps Pipelines, Containers and Serverless
One of the main benefits of the cloud is the ability to get your software to the end customer faster, and more smoothly. An important step is ensuring you are ready to be integrated on AWS Marketplace so that users can find you in the first place. Alongside this, DevOps pipelines are a huge competitive advantage in the industry, embracing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) to roll out updates and changes faster, without downtime or impact on performance or availability. This method can help you create a dialogue with your customers, where they ask for changes or new features, and in as little as weeks – see the updates to your application in response. The increase in containers and serverless services on AWS has also made a huge difference for software companies in terms of efficiency and streamlining operations, allowing professionals to focus on their core product instead of managing their cloud infrastructure.
Improve Security with an Early and Continuous Role Throughout
Many enterprises think of security as something that can be added on after the fact, which then gets in the way of DevOps practices and becomes a hurdle to value, when what you want is for security to be an enabler. In contrast, the right partner will build security into every new process, from starting with a multi-tenancy design, to ensuring network security, data encryption, identity and access management, and auditing and logging. If your move to the cloud was based on a particular business need and not a broader strategy, you may have missed important steps such as segmenting environments using VPCs, or considering compliance regulations for your industry.
Manage Costs with a Phased Approach
If you’ve just completed a migration, you might feel that it’s too expensive and resource-heavy to start making more significant changes. Best practices are to use what you’ve got, starting with what’s essential and then creating a plan in phased stages to build the infrastructure you want. This Agile form of moving to the cloud is cost-effective, avoiding huge changes where it isn’t absolutely critical. Incorporating a tool to monitor your cloud instances and optimize workloads and data transferring can save serious zeroes off your bottom line, you can often do this with small changes that are resource-light.
If AWS isn’t performing for your company, it’s not because the technology isn’t there.
In fact, AWS has a dedicated program, SaaS Factory, for this express purpose, optimizing your existing SaaS platform with AWS best practices, and expanding on what you’ve got.
The right cloud partner will have proven success stories that can be learned from, and leveraged for your own organization. This experience and know-how can open doors for your own business, providing new ways to delight your customers with boosted performance, consistent improvements and innovative features delivered regularly and without disruption.
If you’re looking to enhance or start building your SaaS solution on AWS, get in touch with one of SaaS enablement experts!