Multiple Instances... Pros/Cons?
Good Morning Champions!
Does anyone have multiple instances within their company? If so, can you tell me what led to that decision? Any Pros/Cons you are willing to share would be great!
Andrea
-
Andrea,
In my prior life we maintained 7 instances of Archer, all On Premise. We had a DEV, TEST, and PRD for both the main internal Archer as well as for the externally facing third party portal. Beyond that, we had a Sandbox which we used as a playground for prototyping things we didn't want to risk blowing up, even in DEV, and for evaluating patches as they came out.
0 -
Andrea, MassMutual has a single production instance for our entire company, we do have Dev and QA. We currently share modules and have on demand modules for some of our subsidiaries in that instance. However, as our subsidiaries come on board with Archer as a global GRC tool I am pointing them to their own instance for a variety of reason. The primary reason is it hard enough sharing solutions and building common processes within MM it has been almost impossible with subsidiaries causing us to build on demand solutions in some cases. When we share modules we find ourselves building new fields and DDEs to show and hide company specific functionality which has significantly increase cost of configuration and increased time to implement. Software cost is the biggest con to separate instances. If you want to talk in more detail drop me an email and we can set up a call.
0 -
I've never been the client, but I've supported a lot of clients (including RSA) that have multiple instances.
Generally, I list the pro's of distinct instances as:
- Increased license revenue for RSA (OK... maybe that's not your pro ; )
- Increased flexibility through reduced dependency
- Each instance gets to choose their upgrade timing
- There are fewer stakeholders to get to agree
- Only have to have "my view" for each application
- Contacts have different attributes doing Incident vs Vendor vs BCM
- Reduced complexity of applications to support those differences.
- Don't have to deal with "department X"It really does seem that most of them chose to do it so they didn't have do deal with either personalities, or processes that "the other group" had.
The Con's of distinct instances are:
- Dealing with "department X"
- Redundancy
- You're pushing the business hierarchy how many places?
- Every day?
- Incongruence of applications / User Confusion
- Users are going to two different systems that have different URLs, appearance, etc
- Increased License costs
I'm sure there are others that folks can chime in with, but the biggest distinguishing factor in my experience was the "plays well with others" factor.
B.J.
0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
3 comments