• Article
  • Jul.19.2016

Leveraging Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses (part one)

  • Jul.19.2016
  • Reading time mins

Atlassian has been hard at work developing tailor-made enterprise offerings for companies with large, complex environments. Companies that have already adopted the offerings are raving about them, but what sold them on Atlassian solutions in the first place? In this two-part blog, we take a closer look at where the offerings originated from, and how to leverage Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses.

In this blog, we take a look at the unique challenges facing large, complex organisations.

How are the needs of the enterprise unique?

Complex organisational structure

Enterprise environments can be difficult to navigate; that’s because as companies grow larger, there naturally becomes more to manage. In response to the increase in workload that arises as companies expand, the need for more personnel and specialised departments becomes vital.

Successful large corporations establish multiple departments like legal, marketing and finance to handle different areas of the business, and can employ hundreds to thousands of people in each department. Because of this influx of people and data, the enterprise requires systems and software that are able to handle large amounts of information within and across both these departments – and the organisation as a whole. A company with 10,000 employees, for instance, can no longer delegate on-boarding and off-boarding functions to one HR person, but instead needs a system that can automate repetitive tasks in order to be efficient.

Enterprise companies are also more concerned with things like performance, system resilience and storage, as a loss of information or system access could affect thousands of people and be detrimental to the business. Gone are the days when standard back-of-house functions could be managed by one or two people or even by the CEO himself! Large corporations must adapt and scale in order to be successful.

Well-defined corporate processes

Enterprise companies implement sophisticated business processes in order to create efficiencies and provide guidance and structure to employees. Since most enterprise-size firms have operations in multiple countries and time zones, well-defined internal processes also help to rationalise common tasks and maintain consistency across the company’s disparate business units.

Large organisations invest a significant amount of time and money (sometimes millions of dollars) in developing their internal processes, which makes them much less keen on changing them later! For this reason the enterprise looks for tools that can easily conform to their processes and work complicated workflows, rather than having to adjust the company’s processes to fit within the confined limitations of a particular software package. Small to medium size businesses, however, may not have such comprehensive processes and are typically more flexible to organisational changes, since they will ultimately affect less people.

Security requirements

As the number of employees grows, sensitive internal data and access points increase – and so does a company’s risk level. This puts IT security top-of-mind for enterprise organisations. And if it wasn’t on their minds before, it certainly is now, following the recent data breaches of several successful corporations (looking at you, Target, Anthem and Sony Pictures) that has caused enterprise IT departments around the globe to revisit their security strategies.

Other IT trends such as the cloud, mobility and big data also increase companies’ cyber risk and vulnerability. Large companies must therefore find IT tools that allow them to safely and securely store and access data in a way that doesn’t hinder important business activities. When considering a tool the enterprise prioritises features such as user provisioning, robust user permissions and Single Sign-On: how a user is created, what information a particular user is permitted to see and how to authenticate a user’s identity across multiple systems. While companies big and small are going digital, large organisations face a more difficult security landscape as they have a larger volume of assets to protect, and in turn a higher possibility of an attack or breach.

Join us next week, when I’ll explore how to best utilise Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses.

Want to hear more about how we’ve deployed Atlassian tools for large-scale enterprises?

Read more here

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