According to the Verison State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 Report, 65% of today’s enterprises are using cloud computing – the number is rising significantly yearly. Whether a federal agency, local government IT department or a large enterprise, the cloud presents undeniable benefits. The Kronos Cloud can create faster implementation and upgrade processes, reduce capital expenditures, and guarantee anywhere availability of your workforce management solution for all employees. Although the benefits are clear, migrating to the cloud can be tricky. Common challenges include finding the right cloud vendor or vendors; transitioning from years of legacy IT investments and hardware; and determining how to best manage cloud resources. Here are some common mistakes to avoid when migrating to the Kronos Cloud:
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Inadequate Testing
Inadequate testing is a surefire way to create complications during a migration. Testing your application in the Kronos Cloud for configuration, usability, and interoperability in realistic scenarios will help your organization avoid any miscalculation, delays, or unexpected situations during the migration. Testing should never be anything but structured, well planned, and thoroughly documented. Data integrity and incompleteness problems are often due to inadequate design and testing of data migration and replication systems and processes. A commitment to documenting details and validating results is crucial when migrating critical data to the cloud.
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Disregarding the Planning Phase
As with any large enterprise IT projects, the planning phase is extremely crucial. Before your organization takes any actionable steps, significant time should be dedicated to determining your current state. Here at Improvizations, we provide a service called a Gap Analysis. The first phase of a Kronos Gap Analysis (also called a Kronos Optimization Assessment) examines how an organization currently uses the Kronos application and how it supports the overall business strategy and goals. This identifies the “current state” or how Kronos is used today. Defining the target state allows an organization to honestly evaluate how employees actually use the software. The current state assessment involves reviewing existing configuration, interface requirements, and reporting needs and then reviews how that matches actual operations, existing business requirements and compliance needs. Once the current state has been identified, your organization can move into planning how to best configure your application within the cloud – aka the Target State.
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Rushing along the Migration Process
Moving to the Cloud shouldn’t necessarily happen overnight. Don’t rush to jump into a cloud migration, no matter how tempting it gets, as it can become painful at a later stage. If rushed, configuration details can be overlooked, causing future complications. Working with outside professionals is often the best way to carefully audit your infrastructure, determine your WFM management and cloud requirements, and foresee any compatibility issues that may arise. However, it is important that your organization has a strong IT team with mature Kronos experience. Moving to the Kronos Cloud will not eliminate the need for in-house Kronos IT resources. Daily business support needs will still come up – the change is simply the location of your data. Use the migration process to streamline your IT responses and your internal IT business model.
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Neglecting Security Aspects
Security is one of the biggest considerations when an organization is migrating their WFM application into the cloud. Moving to the Cloud reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for internal redundancy planning in case of a power outage or natural disaster. The Kronos Cloud team performs incremental daily backups and a complete back-up every seven days to a secondary data center with a guaranteed Recovery Time Objective of 72 hours. In many industries there are special requirements applied to data storage and connectivity. While the Kronos Cloud meets the AICPA’s SSAE16 standard, many organizations with highly sensitive data prefer to carry any risk liability themselves.
Beyond these risks, it is crucial to take the time to understand how your current Kronos environment is operating before migrating into the Kronos Cloud. Working with a Kronos consulting firm to conduct an Implementation Assessment will substantially reduce risk and save your organization money in the long run. To learn more about an Implementation Assessment, download our one page info sheet below.
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