Many cloud apps used by businesses nowadays
Data from a study by Blissfully shows that small businesses use 40 SaaS apps on average. That number gets to 203 apps for companies with over 1,000 employees. Indeed, businesses use way too many cloud apps nowadays. This is partly due to the IT decentralization. Departments, teams, and even individuals choose separate tools for their needs. The result is a variety of apps. And most of them are not connected with each other.
More apps = more inefficiencies
The bigger the number of apps, the more opportunities for inefficiencies. Each application has its own databases and workflows. Data must ‘move’ through different places to assist with decision-making and other business needs. Therefore employees get more and more trapped into manually and repeatedly transferring data between different applications. The cost is high. A lot of energy is spent on busywork, instead of on high-value work. Not to mention all the mistakes people make while manually processing data.
Data silos
The more cloud applications a company uses, the more opportunities for silos of data. Since data is stored in each cloud app’s databases, it easily becomes segmented. Even though some integrations between applications do exist, the reality is that apps rarely ‘talk’ with each other. Therefore, often times employees need to manually piece together data from different sources for their analytics, reporting, or business needs. Silos of data hinder business analytics initiatives and may hide valuable insights from being uncovered.
Best of breed
Teams and individuals opt for the ‘best of breed’ approach, rather than the ‘best of suite’. Indeed, this helps with flexibility and independence but it has its drawbacks when it comes to connectivity, integrations, and reporting.
As organizations continue adopting more and more cloud applications, the need of connecting their apps and moving data between them will steadily rise.
Find out how Simply Flows can help. We can make the data flow seamlessly between your cloud apps. That’s right, no more data silos and no more manual transfers of data between your applications.