Here's an idea for upper management: instead of paying for access to a cloud-connected financial dashboard with snazzy graphs and charts that you don't actually understand (but feel warm & fuzzy that you can look at them from you phone at night as you lay in bed), why don't you have the human accountant who you're already paying, to run a quick report and bring it to your desk and go over the numbers with you? If the human is worth what you're paying, they should be able to quickly & effortlessly generate a report with the specific numbers that you're interested in, and explain them to you in any level of detail that you desire.
It can be challenging to make a coherent argument in opposition to SAAS; I know, because I recently tried. My stepfather was espousing the virtues of his new Office365 account. He says to me "You get the full MS Office suite, an email address, and a TB of cloud storage, all for the price of a couple hundred gigs of cloud storage elsewhere." Yeah, but... where do I start? The deal seems great on the surface, and even below the surface, it probably actually IS a great deal. It's not the Office365 account that I specifically have a problem with. It's the underlying concept; the precedent that they're setting. I know, I know... "slippery slope," it's typically a pretty weak argument, but it's all I've got. They're eroding the notion of ownership. The SAAS concept is the same exact concept weaponized by John Deere to essentially turn people's personally owned (and very costly) physical property into perpetually leased equipment, with dues beholden to JD for eternity. Sure, go ahead and sing your songs of praise to Microsoft now for their benevolent gift that keeps on giving, but I don't want to hear your complaints 10yrs down the road when you're writing your annual subscription check to Ford to keep your cloud-connected ECU license active and keep your paid-off truck running. Don't think it will come to that? It already has. Ask a farmer.
If you own your own data, you have to store your own data. Which means you have to own your own data storage system. Which means you have to own your own data storage software and hardware. Which means you're going to have to own your I.T. department, people, locations, etc.... or pay someone to host it for you.
What I experienced at my last job of 30 years was that our parent company had offices in our building. We were our owner's landlord. And we were our owner's I.T. department. They also owned about 25 other companies, our sister companies. So, they had 25 I.T. departments. 25 H.R. departments. 25 advertising departments. 25 accounting departments. 25 buildings. 25 building departments, etc..... you get the picture.
We had enough telephone, server, software, I.T. staff, etc.... to support the entire corporation and all of its child companies. However, they realized (and I agree) that if they housed all of there infrastructure in any one of their child's premises, they could not sell that child company without having to relocate all of that infrastructure and I.T. personnel.
As with most modern corps, they want to be "agile". Which means they want to buy, sell, trade child companies at the drop of a hat, and also be able to relocate themselves at the drop of a hat. To be able to do that, you can't have your I.T. infrastructure in any of your buildings. You have to have it hosted somewhere outside of all of your buildings. So, you rent server farm space, rent software like MS365, gmail, accounting software, telephone systems, etc.... and run it all on virtual servers.
Since nothing resides in your child companies' facilities, you can sell them off, buy new ones, trade them, etc... and not have to worry about any of the old physical way of doing things. Just get them a fast internet connection and off you go.
