As complex IT systems increasingly underpin your daily logistics operations, the task of self-hosting these systems presents escalating challenges. The financial burden of maintaining your own servers for software solutions is skyrocketing. Moreover, this doesn’t even touch on the expertise your team must possess, the stringent safety standards required, and the potential fallout from unforeseen disasters. Thus, the real consideration isn’t whether to transition to SaaS, but rather the timing of such a move.

Arm yourself against cybercrime

Microsoft is ISO 27001 certified for Dynamics 365 Business Central. This is the most prominent certification for data security, reliability, and availability. When you decide to host your logistics software in the Microsoft Cloud, you standardly benefit from all these security advantages.

Up-to-date software as the primary focus

Staying up-to-date is of the utmost importance to arm yourself against any cyber security threats. For your software, as well as your hardware. In every corner of your IT landscape systems must be up-to-date not to leave a small opening for hackers and other threats.

Furthermore, besides the technical aspect, your configuration must be set up according to the latest standards. Think for example about authentication, encryption methods, hardening of your firewalls, virus scanning, etcetera. Do you have colleagues in your organization who have sufficient know-how to secure your systems?

An on-premise solution is updated every year. However, the SaaS updates to the latest version monthly. In that way, you make sure your operation is supported by the latest technology. Furthermore, the impact on your organization for each update is limited. The risks of an update – together with the time required from your IT colleagues – are limited because the step towards the latest version is smaller. In addition, security patches and hotfixes by Microsoft are published as soon as possible. Thanks to the monthly updates, risks and issues are taken care of much quicker.

Limit risks

Despite all precautions, a cyber-attack is still at risk. Therefore, it is important to think about a contingency plan in case your operation is still targeted. For example, can you restore a backup of your system at any given moment? How fast is your software up and running again? And, how vulnerable are other systems when a single application is compromised?

In the SaaS, Microsoft makes sure backups can be restored from a minute before. And, because Microsoft is ISO 27001 certified, they guarantee a backup can be restored to an operational system in case of business interruptions, failure of systems, applications, and data storage, or data loss. Besides, the SQL, application, and web server environments are redundant, minimizing the risk of downtime.

Flexibly manage labor costs

Cybercrime is not the only challenge you face as a logistics service provider. The labor shortages will keep growing and the costs for both labor and energy will fluctuate. The question is: how will you handle this? A side effect of hosting your logistics software in the SaaS is that you easily upscale or downscale the number of users. Are you going into a quiet period and want to limit your costs? Or, do you experience a peak in demand and want to add new users? Then you can change this in no time.