Between investing in licenses, which often take a long time to pay off, and the subscription model, which allows you to smooth out your investment over time while starting to reap the first benefits after a few months, or even a few weeks, companies have made their choice! Their future lies in the cloud. A cloud model that now affects all areas, including data governance.
"We are currently witnessing a shift by all Master Data Management players towards the cloud, whether in 'hosted-managed' or pure SaaS mode, and companies are receptive to these offers, which promote a faster return on investment and enable them to offload part of their responsibilities to the software vendor: updates, securing environments, etc., says Régis Prévot, Partner Data & Enterprise Architecture at Micropole. What's more, by opting for a cloud solution, companies can be sure of benefiting from the latest features offered by the vendor, without having to make any effort, since they don't have to manage updates. As a result, they don't accumulate technical debt - and we know how difficult this can sometimes be to absorb.
Accelerated time to market thanks to the cloud
Companies no longer have to worry about provisioning an environment and configuring it, and can save considerable time on project implementation. What's more, SaaS solutions are often enriched with "vertical" modules that also contribute to accelerating projects. In terms of time-to-market, the difference is significant," explains Régis Prévot. Where it used to take an average of 6 to 8 months to address a project, it now takes an average of just 2 or 4 months, thanks to these pre-configured functionalities. These shorter implementation cycles are the result of standardized SaaS solutions, which require us to stay within technology standards.
Another advantage of SaaS solutions is that they come with protection mechanisms that also speed up implementation: role and permissions management, access rights, filters and more. What's more, the security of the infrastructure is the responsibility of the software vendor and, as Régis Prévot illustrates, by opting for a cloud-based MDM, the company frees itself from time-consuming and sometimes urgent tasks: "Confronted, for example, with the Log4j flaw (known as Log4Shell), some companies with in-house solutions had to turn their schedules upside down to free up resources very quickly to apply the patch or patches, while those using a SaaS MDM were able to rely on their software vendor to solve the problem. In fact, in most cases, cloud MDM offers numerous advantages, provided that certain realities are taken into account, which are not directly linked to MDM, but to the evolution of corporate information systems".
A completely redesigned data path
Among these realities, Régis Prévot cites the rise of the hybrid and/or multi-cloud model, which is turning the organization of inter-application exchanges upside down. In itself, switching MDM to the cloud has no direct impact on this organization," he explains, "but it can be an opportunity to rethink data exchanges with new technologies, such as IPaaS systems, and thus contribute to the modernization of processes".
With almost 20 years' experience in data governance, the Micropole consulting and technology group has solid expertise in these issues.
"Although this trend is only just beginning to emerge, we have already supported a number of companies in switching their MDM to the cloud, with projects generally lasting less than 4 months and quickly yielding tangible benefits. ".
