Cloud-based BPM

Written by: E. Scott Menter, VP of Business Solutions for BP Logix
As the Great Southern California Blackout of 2011 rolled through our offices, I was sitting with a colleague, marking up a Word document. Of course, as both of us are skilled technical experts, we were well aware of the need to save our work periodically against just such an event. And, of course, we had not done so.

Back to the drawing board.

Still, the whole event reminds me why there’s such excitement over cloud-based BPM. Like other online services, cloud-based BPM survives virtually all such minor catastrophes, thanks to the high-end equipment, expert management, and built-in redundancy that are included with the service.

Business processes can’t be at the mercy of the neighborhood power grid. Today, even many small organizations operate in a distributed fashion, so a localized outage should not impact the operation as a whole. Force majeure isn’t what it used to be: your stakeholders expect your business to continue functioning in the face of local—and even regional—failures.

As BPM drives more and more business processes—and as those processes become increasingly customer-facing—the need for an always-on solution becomes more pressing. Modern BPM solutions are web-driven, mobile-friendly, and cloud-available, so process participants can reach them as easily from a waiting room in the Kauai airport as from their desks in the corporate office. These users don’t know that your lights just went out, and they don’t care.

The decision to deploy BPM within your own datacenter or in the cloud is driven by many factors; availability, while essential, is only one of these. Still, as we were reminded last week, stuff happens. When it does, it’s nice to know that your customers, partners, and employees can keep doing their stuff while you’re digging your way out of yours.