Whether you’re optimizing your current terminal operating system (TOS) or evaluating a new one, one of the key decisions you’ll have to make is where to host your platform.
On the surface, it’s a simple question: Should you self-manage the TOS or outsource hosting to a SaaS provider?
The answer has massive implications for your terminal operations, impacting IT budgets, internal resourcing, staffing, security, and adaptability—not to mention the long-term cost of your TOS investment. For terminal leaders already constrained by limited staffing and budgets, the stakes are incredibly high.
With so many variables at play, it’s impossible to make a one-size-fits-all recommendation for every terminal. Instead, IT and operations leaders must carefully consider their terminal’s day-to-day needs and broader business goals to decide whether a self-managed or SaaS TOS is the best approach.
Unsure of where to start in evaluating the best fit for your terminal? Let’s lay out the differences between a self-managed and a hosted SaaS TOS—and walk through everything you need to consider when making this pivotal decision.
Self-managed or hosted SaaS: What’s the difference?
“The key distinction is whether the company is managing everything themselves—self-managing—or having a provider like Tideworks manage it for them,” says Michael Davies, Director of Cloud Platform & Developer Experience at Tideworks. “The decision terminals are making is really about two things: where the infrastructure lives, and who’s responsible for managing and supporting it.”
Here’s what those two options look like in practice:
Self-managed
When terminals choose to self-manage their TOS, they’re taking on all of the hosting and management responsibilities themselves. The TOS software, as well as all the associated applications and servers, is managed by their own IT staff, usually in an on-premise data center.
This means all of the work involved in hosting and managing your TOS system falls on your internal IT team, which comes with a lot of hidden costs and challenges, especially when making sure you have the right in-house skillsets to self-manage a TOS.
This route is usually taken by terminals that have existing servers on-site with the capacity to manage everything—hosting, security, upgrades, etc.—themselves.
“Self-management might appear to offer more control, which can feel reassuring, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to having a healthier or more reliable TOS environment,” says Davies.
Hosted SaaS
Instead of hosting and managing a TOS on their own (e.g., worrying about database requirements, upgrades, and security patches to name a few), terminals can team up with a SaaS partner like Tideworks to handle the management, maintenance, and ongoing updates required for their TOS platform.
Where self-managed hosting falls on in-house IT resources, hosted SaaS does the opposite: All hosting requirements are handled by trusted experts who know the TOS product inside and out.
A hosted SaaS approach outsources activities like TOS management and issue and performance monitoring to best-in-class experts focused on maximizing the value of your TOS.
This allows terminals to realize significant cost efficiencies over time—especially when their internal IT teams are freed up to focus on the work they do best.
“There are economies of scale that a partner like Tideworks can accomplish by hosting many TOS customers,” says Davies. “If you’re one company with one terminal and you’re self-managing, you don’t get any of those economies of scale.”
5 considerations for choosing a self-managed vs. a hosted SaaS TOS
Ultimately, the impact of your TOS hosting approach will be felt across many different terminal teams and aspects of your operations. For that reason, it’s important to evaluate your options before making a decision.
Here are 5 factors every terminal needs to consider:
1. Terminal size and IT staff
As mentioned above, small terminals and IT teams may struggle to allocate the resources and skills required to effectively self-manage their TOS.
“You need staff with a wide range of expertise to effectively manage and maintain all of your TOS applications and infrastructure,” says Davies. “You need database experts, application experts, server and networking experts—a lot of specialties that smaller and mid-size terminals might not have in-house.”
Large terminals with mature IT departments may be better equipped for a self-managed approach, but they’re still likely to run into challenges around having the right in-house skill sets and managing labor and other unexpected costs.
Here are some questions worth asking:
- How well-staffed is my IT team? What expertise do they have?
- Can they manage and maintain on-prem systems reliably?
- Does IT want to offload infrastructure management?
- What should my IT team focus on: Strategic initiatives that will help my terminal compete? Or database, network, security, and infrastructure tasks that we can hand off to experts?
2. Scalability and flexibility
As terminals scale operations and capacity demands rise, your hosting strategy must be built to support growth. A flexible, scalable environment ensures your TOS will deliver long-term value and performance.
“From a technical standpoint, scalability is the same whether your TOS is hosted by Tideworks or self-managed,” Davies says. “The underlying mechanism for scaling doesn’t change. But it’s typically much faster, easier, and more cost-effective to scale within a Tideworks-hosted environment.”
Related: Four Pillars of Driving Excellence in Terminal Operations
3. Security and compliance
Self-managing a TOS means terminals take security and compliance into their own hands. The success of this approach depends on existing security capabilities and whether your team can effectively extend those controls to a new piece of infrastructure.
“It’s a bit of a fallacy to think that additional control will somehow make things better,” says Davies. “I’ve seen situations where a self-managed customer is especially security-conscious, but when you dig in, there are some pretty glaring security risks.”
A hosting partner like Tideworks, for example, can offer robust cybersecurity, data strategy, and data governance programs that are built to maximize TOS security while creating more value out of your first-party data. Tideworks’ solutions are also built with local, national, and international regulations in mind to support a strong, consistent compliance program at any scale.
4. Cost and total cost of ownership (TCO)
The lower up-front cost of a self-managed approach may be appealing to terminals that don’t want to add expenses on top of their TOS investment. But even if you have in-house IT personnel to allocate for hosting and management, there are ongoing operating expenses that will increase the TCO for a self-managed approach.
That’s true whether you’re self-managing on-premise or in the cloud, too. Davies points out that for large, complex deployments, cloud doesn’t necessarily offer the cost savings terminals might expect.
“If you add up the TCO of self-hosting, you’re going to come out behind most of the time,” Davies says. He points to the inefficiencies of hiring full-time employees to serve specialized roles such as an Oracle database administrator (DBA)—a role that’s entirely replaced by a hosted SaaS approach.
“When Tideworks is hosting the TOS, we can have two Oracle DBAs, with years of experience, manage 20 different TOS environments,” he says. “So our cost per TOS on the labor side of things is just going to be way lower than a customer can accomplish on their own.”
Related: How Billing Optimization Pays Dividends for Rail and Marine Terminals
5. Infrastructure risks
Some marine and intermodal terminals are exposed to harsh outdoor conditions where hurricanes and other severe weather can batter the terminal’s physical environment. When terminals choose to host the TOS locally, it increases the need to invest in protection to keep the data center safe in any environment.
Even then, compromises to that physical infrastructure can grind terminal operations to a halt. A hosted SaaS approach helps avoid that scenario, eliminating the need for data center reinforcement and improving operational resilience across the terminal.
Choose the TOS hosting approach that will help your terminal grow
Regardless of whether you opt for a self-managed or hosted SaaS approach, Tideworks’ Mainsail and Intermodal Pro solutions can serve as the modern TOS your terminal needs to meet rising customer demands and optimize your operations for continued growth.
Maximize the ROI of your TOS investment with Tideworks as your trusted hosting partner. With expert support, cost-efficient SLAs, and hosting services that can be tailored to your terminal’s needs, we can help you implement and maintain a modern operations infrastructure that provides a foundation for long-term success.
Ready to learn more about our TOS hosting services? Contact us today.