We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
― William James

Cloudtheapp allows you to easily connect with other teams on the platform. These would usually be teams created by other companies you work with such as suppliers. They can also be other teams or departments within your company.

Once connected with a team, you will be able to send records to them asking questions, requesting comments, and include relevant attachments. Perhaps you would like them to address a complaint, a CAPA, or a billing issue.

Those connected teams may in turn update the records sent to them with the relevant details, then send them directly back to your team. This allows for easy, secure, and seamless communication across teams all within the same system. The communication is also retained for future reference, audits or inspections, right within the relevant records and documents.

The teams you connect to may be making full use of Cloudtheapp as their own QMS and digitization platform. Alternately teams such as suppliers may only register for the free starter plan to allow them to easily process your records and answer your requests. Suppliers (or external parties) will be able to complete this registration in seconds, and it can be done from the standard browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) on any OS or device. In contrast to other so called “supplier portal” systems, there is no complex security or networking configuration, no software to install, no hardware to provision. Therefore no added cost for your suppliers to pass on to you.

This is also a game-changer for suppliers (or external parties) since it allows them to process requests from any client on the same platform instead of having to maintain multiple systems for these interactions.

The way this works is you invite the team you want to connect to as shown in the screen below, once they accept the request you will be able to start sending them records.

I have been noticing an increasing number of legacy software vendors claiming to offer “SaaS Solutions”, giving a false impression to prospects and customers that they are enjoying a “true” multi-tenant SaaS solution experience. Far from it! In reality, these vendors are Single-tenant software providers. 

If you are not familiar with the terminology and need to know the difference between multitenant vs single-tenant system, there are hundreds of resources on the topic and the pros & cons of each. This was defined years ago and multi-tenant systems came out on top as the clear winner on almost all counts. 

This article will instead focus on “Single-tenant” vendors that claim to provide SaaS solutions to make it look like they are providing the full multitenancy SaaS experience when they are not. If your system is SaaS but is from a single-tenant vendor, then you are not getting all the advantages of a true SaaS Multi-tenant solution, here is why:

1.      True SaaS is designed and architected for self-serve and instant time to value, while “SaaS-ifying” or hosted solutions by single-tenant vendors requires setup and provisioning of servers, this wipes out the time to value proposition, adds costs, and requires IT and Cloud expertise from both the vendor and the customer.

2.      Scalability, True Multi-tenant solutions are set up and geared to support thousands if not millions of users in terms of deployed resources, whereas “Hosted” Single Tenant SaaS solutions are provisioned to only serve that one customer, relying on requirements set when buying the instance, leading to nearly continuous slow performance and scalability nightmares.

3.      True Multi-tenant SaaS solutions are built with cloud security in mind from the start, otherwise they can’t convince anyone to give up their data centers and IT control, whereas Hosted Single Tenant Solutions don’t, as they were built to be hosted in an on-premise server and will require a lot of direct attention and additional security measures to be performed separately, adding more to the risk, agony, and cost factors.

4.      Upgrades: If you suffer every time you want to go to the latest release and it takes you more than a couple of hours, then you are not on a true multitenant SaaS. True Multi-tenant improvements and fixes are pushed to one environment once and hence allowing all customers to enjoy features much quicker and with very minimal scheduled downtime, Single-tenant Hosted solutions, on the other hand, need to be done separately for each customer, after collecting information about configurations each customer has made with an effort to customize a patch/upgrade that will end up causing delays, limiting innovation, and costing customers more money.

Conclusion

If you are in the process of purchasing a SaaS EQMS/EHS system, make sure you ask your vendor if their system is a “True” multi-tenant system, meaning that there is one instance of the software serving all customers, one that enjoys all of the benefits of being multitenant, and not what some vendors try to fake, offering a single-tenant instance serving a single customer or in some cases a handful, where they make you share resources with two to four other customers on one cloud server to cut their costs.

 If you are already using a legacy single-tenant hosted “wannabe” multi-tenant system, then you should be able to relate to some or all of the issues I mentioned, therefore, do your company and users a favor and plan your next move to “True” multitenancy SaaS.