fbpx
1-888-310-4540 (main) / 1-888-707-6150 (support) info@spkaa.com
Select Page

5 Reasons You Want Your PLM in the Cloud

Published by Mike Solinap
on July 14, 2014

Put it in the cloud. You’ve heard this catch phrase over and over again, more so in recent years with the proliferation of online technologies and services. As more and more PLM software vendors choose to move their application to the cloud, should you consider moving your application to the cloud as well? Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a mission critical application that needs to be built well in order to maintain optimal performance, reliability, and security.

Here are 5 reasons why you want to move your PLM application to the cloud:

1. Data Proximity

This is probably the biggest benefit the cloud has over traditional on premise solutions. Say you’re a medical device firm with headquarters in Florida, and branch offices in Boston, Raleigh, and Houston. But you have a large supplier based out of California, as well as a large number of remote users scattered throughout the west.

With a cloud based solution, it’s trivial to expand your File Caching Server (FCS) or Distributed File Manager (DFS) footprint to as many geographic locations as needed, and WAN accelerators can only help to a certain extent. When you have to check in a large CAD assembly, there’s no substitute for having sufficient bandwidth to a low latency server.

2. Disaster Recovery

Large firms have the luxury of complete disaster recovery solutions. But what about small to medium sized firms? Can they justify the cost of building out a DR solution? For small and medium sized organizations, disaster recovery in the cloud is a no-brainer.

3. Isolate and Integrate

These terms sound like oxymorons, but by isolating your PLM environment into the cloud, you can easily allow access to suppliers, outside developers, and contractors. IT organizations typically make this difficult — HR involvement, AD accounts, VPN access, etc. This is for a good reason too, once you’ve obtained access into an organization, it is difficult to limit exactly what you can and cannot access. Isolation makes this a non-issue.

Integrations to the cloud aren’t any more difficult. In fact, you could argue that there’s increased security, as each integration is setup only on an as-needed basis. By having the environment isolated, defining authorization between applications is more clear-cut.

4. Minimal Capital Investment

As part of your PLM implementation, you’ve made significant investments into CAD software licenses, PLM seats, even database licenses. The last thing on your mind is worrying about what the server costs will be. Or perhaps IT requires more VMware vSphere licenses to support your application, as well as additional storage overhead costs. These could take a significant bite out of your budget. With a cloud hosted solution, you pay only for as much as you need, with no up front costs. Cloud providers are now providing options to include MS SQL Server and Oracle database licenses as well.

5. Scale Down

There is lots of talk about cloud and the ability to scale. But consider scale in terms of an on premise solution. Take for example, you have a key project milestone on the horizon. You hire a large number of temporary CAD designers to help get your product to market faster. Do you have the ability to scale up in time? What about after the project is complete? Can you scale down and recoup those additional investments? Unfortunately, you can’t return those extra vSphere licenses or Oracle database licenses.

Next Steps:

Mike Solinap
Professional Services Manager
SPK & Associates

Latest White Papers

How CloudBees Uses Feature Management to Gain Competitive Advantage

How CloudBees Uses Feature Management to Gain Competitive Advantage

In this whitepaper, you’ll discover how CloudBees Feature Management Flags can help you gain a competitive advantage in the market.  Discover CloudBees Feature Management In this CloudBees Feature flag whitepaper, you’ll learn: How to increase your developer...

Related Resources

Salesforce Migrates DevOps to the Cloud with CloudBees CI

Salesforce Migrates DevOps to the Cloud with CloudBees CI

Industry:  Software Geography: Global Salesforce empowers software developers to create high-quality, secure enterprise apps on its Force.com platform by moving development operations to the cloud using CloudBees CI and Amazon EKS. Challenge: Migrate app development...

Atlassian News Q1 2023 and What To Expect at Atlassian Team 23

Atlassian News Q1 2023 and What To Expect at Atlassian Team 23

In 2023, Atlassian continues to evolve with new product features, target markets and demographics. This is keeping their leader status for collaboration and productivity tools. Atlassian software is used by thousands of companies worldwide to manage projects, track...

Moving Code Corp to the Atlassian Cloud

Moving Code Corp to the Atlassian Cloud

Code Corp has around 250 users of their Atlassian suite and specializes in high-performance barcode readers and scanning software. This hardware and software provide data capture for many different industries and use cases. Additionally, they power track-and-trace...