Scaling an organization effectively is no small feat, and as the saying goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” One of the biggest planning mistakes you can make is underestimating the importance of modernizing your software and tech stack. Organizations that fail to proactively plan their growth journey will likely face significantly more hardship as they scale. For example, single-server instances are typically not meant to operate at scale, which can lead to issues such as degraded performance and outages, and a lack of capabilities that are critical at an enterprise level. As a best practice, we recommend organizations anticipate demand and manage growing pains before they happen, upgrading to an appropriate software offering before these problems surface.
Upgrading to a software offering that built for enterprise-grade demands is one of the most impactful steps an organization can take to overcome the challenges it will face at scale – performance, availability, user management, security. By upgrading to offerings such as Atlassian Cloud or Data Center, organizations get enterprise-grade platforms that are specifically designedwith features and functionalities to help overcome these challenges.
In failing to modernize legacy systems, organizations leave themselves open to unnecessary setbacks, like these:
1. Stressed and overtaxed IT teams
Adding more users and more work to a single-server instance makes for a stressed IT team. When organizations delay an upgrade, IT teams are often forced to act as firefighters, dealing predominantly with performance, uptime, and user management, rather than fulfilling their potential as strategic partners helping the organization gain a competitive edge. This problem is easily mitigated with the right software. Atlassian Cloud and Data Center are specifically designed to help alleviate and automate many of the common stressors that admins encounter with a combination of specific features and the ability to seamlessly scale.
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2. Lost revenue and increased costs
Most companies are in the business of making money, and we all know it takes money to make money. In failing to appropriately invest in their software, they’re setting themselves up for significant costs down the road. As mentioned, software that runs on a single server is not built for enterprise-scale or demands, meaning so there’s a tipping point where organizations will face an overall degradation in system performance and, inevitable, additional downtime, both of which directly correlate to the bottom line. With enterprise-grade software offerings, that tipping point becomes irrelevant, and organizations can operate efficiently and effectively.
Picture this: an organization acquires a new company or expands into a new geography. They see promise in the opportunity and revenue stream, but their single server is not set up for the spike of new users and a distributed workforce, leading to repetitive system outages. By not investing and modernizing their software, the company is not only unable to reap the benefits of their strategic decisions, such as an increased talent pool of new employees, but they’re losing money in the process, as work is not getting done but the new employees are still an accrued cost.
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3. Increased security and compliance demands
Ensuring a secure and compliant environment is often at the top of organizations’ priority lists, but these objectives become more urgent and nuanced with scale. This is often because larger companies oversee an inherently decentralized business, with a broad range of teams and tools spanning functions, regions, and, in many cases, subsidiaries. As a result, the number of applications with access to sensitive information increases significantly, and the cost of not meeting security and compliance standards has never been more profound. As organizations grow and instances increase in size and volume, identifying security and compliance issues quickly and manually is no longer a viable option. These issues can impact everything from throughput to competitive differentiation to legal entanglements, which is why Atlassian’s enterprise-grade software has specific features to assist organizations to meet these demands.
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As organizations scale, the complexities of business both increase and shift. Here, we’ve covered three common risks of failing to upgrade, but there are many more that organizations must consider. Modernizing software to an offering that is designed to overcome those issues makes organizations more efficient and effective, enabling them to focus on the work they do best while relying on their software to support them to its fullest extent.
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