Key Indicators That You’re Building a Stitched-Together ‘FrankenCloud’

by Chris Preimesberger

If your company is built on a FrankenCloud, then your applications are running in separate cloud environments. This means it’s nearly impossible for departments to smoothly hand off information and automate processes. As a result, your IT department has to spend what feels like an arm and a leg just to get your cloud applications running together via third-party integrations, and more often than not, these integrations are complex, rigid and fragile.

Finance departments play a significant role in every company, interacting with several departments each day. When companies run on a FrankenCloud, finance ends up having to jump around from one cloud system to another to find the information it needs. This broken chain of events thwarts productivity and slows down internal business process.

When customer support departments such as accounting, sales or finance are using different systems, they aren’t able to get a single view into the customer journey. With each department making decisions before they have a full picture of the customer, processes are likely to take longer than expected, clients may be billed incorrectly or too early, and customer requests can become a challenge to get answered quickly and accurately. These inefficiencies frustrate customers and can be damaging to your reputation.

Likewise, when internal departments aren’t aligned, customer-facing teams are unable to access the information they need, such as a billing receipt or order update, quickly and easily. This delay in information drags out processes and frustrates employees behind the counter. As mentioned in the previous slide, it also frustrates your customers, and when customers aren’t happy, employees aren’t happy. Building internal workflows across departments can create smooth internal processes so companies can keep their employees happy and become more customer-centric.

Because FrankenCloud makes it difficult for employees to extend their workflows across departments, they often revert back to phone calls and emails for approvals. Not only is this hugely inefficient and hard to trace, but it can increase the risk of non-compliance and complicate configuration. Matching company policies with business needs should be as easy as a point and click but unfortunately, FrankenCloud creates headaches when it comes to these processes.

Another sign you have a FrankenCloud is when your employees are forced to deal with multiple applications that have different user accounts, interfaces and profiles. Because these tools are built on different systems and are spread out across databases, maintaining records is complicated, often leading to errors in reporting that waste time and money.

Along those lines, FrankenCloud creates cloud silos, which means that your employees can’t get a comprehensive view into your company’s health. This hinders strategic decision making and hampers employees’ ability to play an active, well-informed role in planning, strategy and data analysis. It also makes it nearly impossible for you to know the true status of internal projects or get reports in a timely manner.

You can also tell you’re building a FrankenCloud when your disconnected applications, which spread information across various departments, require additional training and support so that employees understand and can use each solution effectively. In addition to wasting your company’s time and money, it’s keeping your employees from focusing on the tasks at hand.

Each cloud platform has its own data security controls that need to be reviewed and audited. Therefore, you’re forced to compile every transaction, attached document and supporting note that’s required within the audit process. While it’s extremely time consuming to gather the supporting materials, it can also increase your company’s risk of failing an audit.

With applications spread out across various platforms, information can easily slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, this means that standards for security, auditability and business continuity are unstable. In addition to creating a security risk for the organization, this can be dangerous for customers.