Integrate Cloud Services Support to Avoid the Help(less) Desk
Are your cloud services providers giving you the help desk runaround? Are they constantly telling you that they do not own a problem and they cannot fix it? Nowadays, a typical small- or medium-sized company is using four or five different cloud services and spending an average of $7,000 per year on subscriptions.
No wonder it is often difficult to keep track of how all the cloud services providers interact to quickly pin down and solve problems that arise. The notoriously weak cloud service level agreements are bad enough. But add in the further complexity of conflicting information about which system is failing, and you are asking for an operations disaster with the potential for long outages while the various service providers involved play the blame game.
A major downside of using cloud services is that customers often find they are responsible for any needed integration across the different applications and vendors. This includes any outages or problems that result from a breakdown of one or more of the various applications in the data workflow chain.
For example, if an application passes data between a Salesforce and NetSuite implementation, any problems with the data transfers are going to be the responsibility of the user, not the providers. Unknowingly, customers have taken on the role of cloud application and integration brokers—whether they planned to or not!
One approach to minimizing the risks and improving service quality is to identify which company is responsible for what part of the system. To accomplish this goal, capture the data flows including the hand-offs between the various cloud applications. Identify the processes for data flowing into and out of the different cloud applications. It is important to understand how the data flows through the network as well as the applications, because if the network is unavailable, so are the applications.
Once the data flows are completely understood, it is essential to establish fully transparent and well-documented processes and procedures for communicating with each service provider. This includes maintaining records of the standard ticket reporting and formal escalation procedures for all the providers that are touched by the system. Take note that each provider will manage its help desk and trouble ticket portals a bit differently.
Don’t forget: If the application is maintained on a managed hosted system, include the data center provider in addition to the software vendor. If the problem is the connectivity to the data center, no amount of yelling at the software vendor is going to fix the issue.
In an ideal world, organizations should be able to purchase services from cloud systems integrators who have responsibility for managing the interfaces among all the system components, but that ecosystem of vendors has not jelled yet. There are a few companies, such as Jitterbit and Appirio who are starting to work on products that address this issue.
So while you wait for the vendors to realize that businesses are looking for integrators to package cloud services, processes can be implemented, with some pre-planning, to reduce support headaches and simplify the troubleshooting of IT cloud services issues.
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