Intranet — to cloud or not to cloud?
If your boss asks you to build a new intranet, you will be confronted to build this new project in the cloud or on premises (no cloud). Even if you think you do have an option, usually it is not a question of whether or not, but of when and how.
Today, almost every vendor of enterprise content management solutions provides a cloud option. And despite the fact, that as a customer you still can choose from both worlds (on premise and cloud), most vendors push their energy in the cloud market due to customer bonding. Customer bonding is key: when hardware and maintenance are not in-house, it becomes much more difficult to move away from the vendor’s system. So the vendors invest a lot of time and money in the cloud, due to strategic considerations.
You may still choose “on premise”: but new features and support will not be on the strategic prio list of your vendor then. Can you condone that when your intranet is in a critical situation?
The second fact in this discussion will weigh-in very much in the decision making process of your management: one-time costs for planning and installation seem to be higher for on premises since you need to setup hardware and infrastructure on your own. Follow-up costs also will be hard to be kept low: You will need system engineers and technical intranet administrators in-house or external to ensure the system will be patched and maintained regularly. Your management can decide between CapEx and OpEx. Guess what they do prefer?
Back to the opening question: to cloud or not to cloud.
Today’s market is forcing you to cloud software. And the current is strong. You might still argument against cloud with risk mitigation e.g. by considering data security and dependency (even lock-in) of mostly US-based software vendors. But your management will usually neglect this (since all vendors have good arguments how they ensure “data security”). So this argument will not weigh enough.
So chances are good that you will need to go for the cloud option — even if you would prefer the other way personally. If this is the case, I recommend following key principles in your project:
- Embrace the standard feature set
Avoid customizing as far as possible. Establish a project golden rule, e.g. “Standard before UX before Visual Design” and let it approve on the kick-off by the management. And especially: become a master of the software on your own! Play around in demo environments as soon as possible. - Invest into performance
The start page of your intranet has to rock! If you want to invest somewhere, invest into a fast start page. Reserve budget for performance optimization. And check your network infrastructure critically! - Go for an agile project setup
Cloud software can change it’s feature set without a long warning beforehand. Even if you are close to the vendor, do not underestimate this topic. Do not design for functionalities but design and deliver use cases. In an agile project mode, change is a constant element and part of the game.
