KRAKEN LEVERAGES THE POWER AND FLEXIBILITY OF OPEN SOURCE TO EMPOWER SMALL BUSINESS GROWTH AND REDUCE SAAS BURDEN
If your business is operating on a fixed IT budget, contact us today. We can maximize your IT budget and help you lower your SaaS burden. Open source doesn’t have to be complicated. Let us take care of the complex part for you so you can focus on your customers. We’re here to help your business grow–not to sell you on vendor contracts. Contact us today to find out how we can add value to your IT budget with open source.
THE SAAS PROBLEM
Have you ever heard the term “SaaS Burden?” SaaS Burden is what happens when a company becomes heavily reliant on Software as a Service platforms. If you’re new to IT, SaaS is a licensing model where the right to use a piece of software is sold as a monthly recurring subscription. SaaS Burden presents major issues for a growing company and can stop progress dead in its tracks. SaaS Burden is a combination of 3 key issues, which you will see demonstrated here. Unfortunately for new and growing companies who depend on software to do business, subscription software is becoming unavoidable as more vendors shift away from single-purchase licensing.
We use the term subscription creep to describe a situation where the cost of SaaS subscriptions creeps up, or accumulates slowly, often times going unnoticed until subscriptions represent a major line item on the company’s budget. Everyone wonders where the money went, but nobody actually knows where it’s going to. This is subscription creep. Often times, we can fix this with a simple SaaS audit and a few phone calls to vendors. Other times we may have to come up with more creative solutions to solve solution creep.
MORE APPS, LESS SECURITY
Nobody talks about the hidden IT burden of many SaaS services. IT must manually provision and de-provision users in each and every SaaS instance that your company uses. This can leave long-departed employees “still in the loop” of your company’s operations if something was forgotten in the offboarding process. Another risk is creating “data silos” where data ends up locked away in SaaS platforms that aren’t connected. This is costly, burdensome and represents a major issue for your operations, especially when your users need to spend a significant portion of their workweek consolidating conflicting data.
YOU NEED A SOLUTION
If you are experiencing data silos or manual provisioning issues related to SaaS, we can help. Our consultants have years of experience with software and hardware integration to back up what we do.
CAVEAT: THE “OPEN SOURCE TO THE RESCUE” (NOT ALWAYS) PROBLEM
One way to solve the SaaS subscription creep problem is by introducing open source software into the production pipeline to replace an expensive SaaS application. Less experienced IT consultants will often pitch open source as a “one size fits all” solution to multiple issues. Open source can be appealing to startups and security-forward companies. Software projects are free and allow for inspection of the complete code used to build the project. However, open source comes with its own set of problems. Code commits and patches come from many different sources, sometimes the project doesn’t vet commits very well, or the code is slow and clunky, and it doesn’t always play nicely with existing business software and often requires integrations costing many times more than the original SaaS it was meant to replace. This is the problem that nobody wants to talk about. We do.
Kraken delivers solutions based on results, not marketing hype or bleeding edge, unstable technology. We perform exhaustive testing and research before recommending a solution. And we only use software & hardware that is well tested in a production environment.