Moving Maximo to the cloud is a hot topic in our industry. Everyone wants to reduce hassle and eliminate tedious jobs. Before you take the leap, we recommend learning about the benefits and potential pitfalls you might face.

What are the specific benefits of the cloud?

• Gain efficiency: Free your staff from tedious administrative tasks and routine maintenance.
• Upgrade automatically: Your team will always be working with the latest version of Maximo.
• Prepare for the unexpected: Since most third-party providers supply back-up servers, you are protected from unexpected downtime.

Beyond these initial improvements, the cloud allows you to scale easily and work anywhere with full access to Maximo. Because your staff is less burdened with day-to-day tasks, you can turn your attention to more strategic projects. This can lead to greater productivity and job satisfaction.

What about security in the cloud?

This is an essential question, especially when you are considering a third-party hosting provider or a more specialized Maximo hosting provider.

Bottom line: Utilize SAML.

• SSO (Single Sign-On), more specifically SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is the key to keeping user information/credentials secure.
• SAML is a framework for user authentication and authorization between two entities; particularly, service providers that host Web applications such as Maximo.
• With the release of Maximo 7.6.0.3, IBM added SAML support specifically because their Maximo SaaS is growing at a high rate.

Utilizing SAML means that Maximo doesn’t need to store or synchronize identities, which ensures that there are fewer places for identities to be breached or stolen. SAML leverages Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which is an additional layer of security to protect the identities from being attacked. You will want to ensure that your hosting provider utilizes SAML as part of their security protocol. InterPro utilizes SAML as the preferred security protocol for EZMaxMobile.

What’s the smartest way to make the switch?

• Transition Internally: Your IT director can orchestrate the changeover internally.
• Outsource: Several companies specialize in moving Maximo to the cloud. These firms can help you orchestrate third-party or self-hosting, integration, security, upgrades, and all the details that will ensure success.

Making the actual move should be the last step in a considered process. If an enterprise move is being orchestrated internally, make sure someone from your team can clearly articulate your needs and any issues that are specific to Maximo users.

Is this a good time to go mobile?

• Increase productivity: Like moving to the cloud, going mobile helps everyone on your team increase productivity.
• Use Maximo to the fullest: Going mobile allows you to tap the full potential of Maximo.
• Transition together: From an IT perspective, it makes sense to implement mobile when you move to the cloud.

EZMaxMobile is not only designed be hosted in a cloud environment, it is the only mobile application that is secured with SAML. It is also the only fully-functional Maximo mobile solution that can be installed on your server in under 30 minutes. Because EZMaxMobile is highly flexible you can easily configure your screens to conform to your specific processes, workflows, and requirements.