As Paul Comfort, host of the Transit Unplugged podcast, has said many times, “Technology is changing public transit faster than almost any field other than medicine.” The increased speed of technological innovation and adoption has put a strain on transit systems to keep up with fast-paced, demand-driven riders. Finding ways to keep up with the times and becoming more agile is challenging.
Finite budgets present further complications regarding flexibility. Budgets are set yearly (sometimes multiple years in advance), making investments or changes more complicated or unattainable. Finding ways to reduce your operational expenditures offers some financial room to play with and gives you some added agility.
One way to do this is by switching your software operations to the cloud. Through cloud technology, shifting resources away from IT infrastructure, you can also speed up the pace of your innovation and reduce the time to market when implementing new transit innovations.
Additionally, there are hidden costs associated with on-premises solutions. Maneuvering through this new transit landscape is challenging enough. Losing out on opportunities because of unknown or unanticipated costs associated with on-premises solutions doesn’t need to happen. Let’s look at some of the areas where hidden costs can significantly impact your operations.
Deployments of on-prem solutions take months to complete. The costs incurred during this process include time spent planning, installing new hardware, and installing and testing your new software. All these things are compulsory before you can reap the benefits of your new investment.
That’s less time for you and your passengers to take advantage of your new tool. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity for the next technological advancement to come out, making your purchase less valuable. Technology changes quickly, and on-prem deployments are not conducive to improving your agility.
Cloud follows a simpler, hands-off deployment process. This process takes days (to weeks) to complete. The faster you can introduce technology, the faster you can pass the benefits to your riders by leveraging your new tools. Because of the rapid introduction of disruptive technology combined with new transit options (TNCs, microtransit, scooters, etc.), your riders expect a certain quality, consistency, and growth. Taking months to deploy new technology is a missed opportunity to capture riders that would take transit but are now choosing alternative options.
Transit can’t go down so neither can your transit technology. Mobility is essential – people rely on transit to function in their lives. It’s unacceptable if your riders can’t get to where they need to go because your system is down.
On-prem software solutions need a dedicated IT service team accountable for the specification of the system’s production and to provide operational support. This includes any operational monitoring, maintenance, reporting, and hardware or software upgrades to keep your systems in peak form. The team is typically 24/7/365 in nature due to the low tolerance of downtime of mission-critical enterprise systems.
When a new project is underway, or expansion is needed, and you are dealing with physical assets (servers, switches, routers, maintenance systems, etc.), sometimes, you must plan a few years in advance because of the additional space and infrastructure needed. This leads to less time to keep up with newer technology. You can’t pivot if something new comes along that forces you to change direction. Your agility is severely strained by the resources and planning needed for some of these projects.
A top agency recently moved their Enterprise Asset Management solution to the cloud to improve their support cycle. Their issue resolution lifecycle will likely drop from weeks to days. This means they'll no longer need to worry about monitoring, support, and maintenance of the cloud environment, greatly reducing the need for their IT staff to handle 24/7 operations. This will enable them to focus on more pressing and strategic activities such as getting more insights out of data.
Security is a crucial element of concern. On-prem and cloud are relatively equal in terms of security. While on-prem solutions can be a tad more secure, they require a lot of resources to ensure that level of security which could hurt your agility. Nevertheless, security is no laughing matter, so choose the option that best suits the needs of your agency.
Additionally, as an organization dealing with the health information of certain riders, you are required to comply with HIPAA regulations. Your compliance requires you to undergo rigorous exercises to ensure that you can operate at proper safety and privacy standards. These can take months to complete for more sophisticated systems. Within the cloud, it’s typical for cloud vendors to provide an environment compliance audit from the infrastructure side for some of the most well-known compliance frameworks such as HIPAA. They must do it for all of their customers, so they (and you) can leverage that resource and their expertise.
With finite budgets, exponentially increasing speeds of technological advancements, disruptive transportation and mobility options, the only way to survive is to lower your costs and become more agile. It’s easy to calculate hardware and storage costs. It becomes difficult to measure the costs when you change core capacity or other infrastructure needs within the on-prem model. Through cloud, you can reduce volatility in the financial model and lower capital risks, both internally and externally.
Agility, new technology adoption, and innovation are the ways transit agencies survive in the future. Remember: There is more to cost than just the dollars and cents.
To learn more and connect with your peers on how cloud can enhance your technology planning, join us at ThinkTransit 2020. Dive into our Keybook summary of keynote presentations and read up on all the highlights of the 2019 conference!
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