CQ Explains: Key Benefits of a Salesforce-based EQMS and EHS Solution

Salesforce vs. AWS and Azure for EQMS and EHS

In today’s rapidly changing world, it is a no-brainer to choose a cloud-based QHSE (EQMS + EHS) solution.

Customers today want a QHSE solution that is natively built in the cloud. It must not be a modified version of an on-premise solution that has been ‘cloud washed’ – hosted or private (single-tenant) cloud. Rather, the architecture must be built from the ground up for the cloud. In a single-tenant architecture, each client will have one particular software/application. So in the single-tenant architecture, the development and maintenance cost has to be completely owned by one particular client. Also, if the developer wants to update the application, he/she has to manually update it for each client.

The benefits of a QHSE solution built on a modern multi-tenant cloud platform are fairly obvious to most decision-makers today. It is easier in terms of product upgrades. It is also more secure, scalable, flexible, and configurable without heavy IT investment. A cloud-native solution also seamlessly connects and integrates with other business applications like your ERP, CRM, and other corporate systems.

The more important question today is: What is the right cloud platform to use while building a next-generation QHSE solution?

In fact, this is a question that the founding team at ComplianceQuest asked itself in the early days of building the company.

Should we go with Microsoft’s Azure or Amazon’s AWS? These are, of course, among the world’s best, most comprehensive, and widely-adopted cloud platforms. Both AWS and Azure offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), so product companies don’t have to worry about compute and storage capacities and platform development tools as business scales.

Having said that, the development tools available in the AWS and Azure ecosystem allows each developer to use these tools to build their application any way they want – there is no consistency, no certification, and no guarantee that other vendor applications will work together or easily integrate.

On the other hand, the Salesforce platform offers much more than infrastructure. It is, in fact, a “Business” Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) wherein all IT management (infrastructure and application platform innovation) requirements are automatically taken care of. Vendors can take advantage of the application development tools in building consistency into their solution, such as an intuitive user interface/user navigation, reporting, dashboards, etc.

In this post, we offer a deep dive into the finer differences between AWS or Azure offers as a platform vs. Salesforce.

This will also show why we built ComplianceQuest on the Salesforce platform.

One of the biggest advantages of Salesforce is that – it is a modern multi-tenant cloud (no hosting or private cloud) with a metadata-driven architecture for increased security and the platform-tools (PaaS) are consistent, connected and certified.

Aspect #1: IT Management Requirements

There is no doubt that both AWS and Azure are wonderful options to build modern, cloud-based applications. These platforms offer a wide-range of developer tools to drive agility into the application development lifecycle. They support the building of applications using serverless technologies like AWS Lambda. Development tools like AWS Amplify and AWS CDK are extremely intuitive to use and can accelerate the development lifecycle.

Microsoft Azure too is designed to build applications with cloud-native architectures with microservices. The platform offers everything from managed databases and AI solutions to DevOps support and in-built monitoring.

Azure also offers a range of low-code development tools to build applications with lesser code. Of course, it is easy to scale and extend these apps with Azure services.

But, there are a few disadvantages, as listed below.

When AWS or Azure is used

When AWS or Azure is used, the product vendor is still responsible for the following:

• Proper provisioning
• Security to protect data (while AWS and Azure provide security of the cloud and infrastructure, the customer is still responsible for security within their application)
• Efforts to secure the code base
• Security to ensure data between customers does NOT get mixed up
• FDA compliance and all other regulatory requirements had to be automated.
• Compliance requirements such as HIPAA, PCI, SOC 1, SOC 2, etc
• Disaster Recovery – to minimize downtime and accelerate recovery of data
• Platform level innovation – wherein the vendor has to build platform tools using AWS’ or Azure’s infrastructure
• Scalability for load balancing, usage spikes, etc
• Availability monitoring
• Vulnerability assessment and protections

Of course, Amazon offers developers a wide-range of tools to take care of each of these requirements. In some cases, there are pre-built tools that developers can use to accelerate platform-level innovation.

However, from a QHSE solution perspective, the biggest disadvantage of using AWS or Azure is that one still needs a dedicated IT and technology team to build and manage the infrastructure. This often results in increased costs and slower time-to-value.

Advantage of Salesforce

As briefly touched upon above, Salesforce offers a modern cloud “Business Platform” not only providing IaaS and PaaS but also Business Development Tools. For example, all apps built will have the same user interface, user navigation, and report & dashboard generation. Using a Salesforce built app makes it familiar and easier to use other apps which helps accelerate user adoption.

The biggest advantage of building a QHSE solution on the Salesforce platform is that — the process of provisioning is taken care of automatically. The vendor (a company like ComplianceQuest) does not have to worry about setting up the technology to ensure the security of data, availability monitoring, load balancing, etc. All this is automatic in the case of a PaaS like Salesforce.

What we at ComplianceQuest need to worry about is building relevant business applications, with a focus on delivering customer value. Both the vendor (like ComplianceQuest) and end-customer of the QHSE solution can be at peace that all the IT management, security, governance and compliance needs are robust and complete.

The Salesforce PaaS is designed to deliver the following:

• A multi-tenant SaaS application that is available for various customers to use
• Data and information security
• Compliance requirements such as HIPAA, PCI, SOC 1, SOC 2
• Automatic disaster recovery, with necessary backups, is automatically setup
• Ongoing vulnerability assessment, with automatic upgrades and patches, is taken for granted
• Scalability
• High availability
• Platform level tools like Chatter (for collaboration) and Einstein Analytics (for charts and dashboards) to leverage and build on. In the case of AWS, for instance, Amazon Chime can be configured for collaboration but the process is not seamless and pricing may be a bottleneck.
• Flexibility and easy configuration capabilities make it easy to automate the QHSE workflow as per the demands of the business

Overall, from a value proposition standpoint, Salesforce is better for two key reasons: lower TCO and faster time-to-value (TTV).

Aspect #3: Innovation at the Platform level

When AWS is used

The answer to this question is straightforward: To drive innovation at a platform level, vendors need a top-notch cloud engineering team to take advantage of what AWS offers.

For instance with AWS, if you would like to build a team collaboration tool like Chatter, it requires a highly-skilled team of developers and cloud specialists to build this into your application.

If ComplianceQuest had used AWS, we would have to allocate bandwidth to build something like Chatter or Einstein Analytics, using various AWS Services, SDKs, or AWS Marketplace third-party software, taking away time on focusing on our customers’ problems and our solutions.

Advantage of Salesforce

With the Salesforce platform, our work has become easier. More importantly, it is about understanding and solving the needs and wants of our end-users – quality and safety professionals. We’re able to leverage Salesforce platform tools like Einstein AI, Einstein Analytics and Chatter and build application-specific capabilities on top of that.

Salesforce improves the platform and releases new capabilities three times a year and provides early releases for vendors to test and prepare their applications for smooth upgrades. This allows vendors like ComplianceQuest to get access to continuous platform-level innovation which is reflected in how the usability of the app continues to improve.

Salesforce also offers a trusted integration and API Platform, to integrate data from any system.

The API platform makes it easy to

• Rapidly connect any app, IoT device, data, or computing device in the cloud or on-premises with Salesforce MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
• It is also easy to bring data from any third-party system such as Oracle, SAP etc. into Salesforce

With the Salesforce Platform, developers (and business users) can take advantage of lightning-fast no-code tools to build and configure apps, very quickly. Some of the capabilities of the Salesforce Platform includes:

• Lightning App Builder – user interface
• Schema Builder – object data model and custom fields
• Process Builder – workflow
• Social Collaboration – chatter and social like
• Embedded Analytics – reports and dashboards
• Translation Workbench – multi-lingual
• Communities – portals
• Mobile app builder – mobile accessibility

For more information, visit: https://www.salesforce.com/ap/products/platform/services/what-you-build-with/

IThere are several other advantages of going with Salesforce-based EQMS and EHS, included reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and inherent advantages of a low-code platform.

Overall, the key advantages of building application solutions on the Salesforce platform, includes the following reasons:

• Ease of integration with other business systems including CRM, ERP, PLM and inventory control systems
• Unique platform tools like Einstein Analytics & AI, Reporting & Dashboards, AppExchange, IoT, Chatter & Mobile that are available in Salesforce
• Ease of collaboration with Salesforce Chatter
• Mobile apps and mobile-first capabilities, further strengthened by the power of the Salesforce 1 Platform
• Data visibility and traceability functionality in Salesforce make it easy to build features like audit trails
• Single data model across CRM, Services and QHSE, making it easy to automate processes like Complaint Management
• Scalability & Flexibility and Enterprise-grade security and compliance
• Ease of configuration
• Easy for IT to deploy and administer and easy for business end-user to manage
• Better TCO and ROI