Selling into enterprises often requires not just a great product, but also a set of specific capabilities relating to security, compliance, scaling, resilience, and more. Your buyers might need to check some of these things off their list before they can even consider doing business with you. This is called enterprise readiness.

There are five major areas that enterprises generally look for:

• Security and privacy

• Deployment flexibility

• Compliance and reporting

• Scaling and automation

• Resilience and high availability

Security and privacy

Enterprises host and process critical customer data, so ensuring that your platform addresses all scenarios from a security-first perspective is essential to your readiness. You have to ensure that you can detect, identify, and respond to security threats at every level of the organization.

A closely connected element is privacy, with consumer-first regulations like GDPR and CCPA requiring enterprises to treat customer data responsibly.

For example, your product might need to provide sophisticated multi-factor authentication, SOC2 compliance, and Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities to align with enterprise standards.

Deployment flexibility

Enterprises expect you to be able to deploy your solution in a variety of configurations to suit their environment – across clouds, hosted by them or by you, or in some kind of hybrid architecture. Most enterprise software companies build processes, or even hire teams, that allow them to support a wide variety of deployment configurations (at considerable cost).

For example, your product may be architected to live on your own infrastructure, but a large enterprise customer needs to run it from their VPC for security or other reasons. Or you need to have a bunch of single-tenant instances, running on your own architecture.

Deploying across different architectures creates other problems, too, including version management and updating issues, which need to be accounted for as well.

Compliance and reporting

You've got to make sure that when your product is deployed and used that it complies with all relevant standards for whatever laws apply to your customers. This might include certain standards for data processing and privacy, among others.

For example, depending on your enterprise customer's region, you might be required to provide data residency options where your customer data might be stored. You might also be required to report and fix customer data processing requests under GDPR.

Your product might also need to provide detailed audit information for data and usage and certify the platform regularly for compliance requirements like SOC2.

Scaling and automation

Your product might be viewed as a critical enabler for your enterprise customers to trust your platform with their essential business use cases over a prolonged period. As a result, they’ll want to know that you have a plan to handle any workloads that may run on your platform.

Resilience and high availability

Your product needs to be able to withstand disruptions at the application and infrastructure layer and be able to recover seamlessly from such unanticipated scenarios. Being able to instrument your platform for observability and notifications, along with rigorous business continuity planning and testing, is essential for your product to show resilience.

How to start the enterprise readiness process

We now know the essential elements of what enterprise readiness looks like. The question now is: how do we get our products to that level? This section will look at fundamental areas to get started:

• Long-term objectives

• Readiness audits

• Vendor evaluations

Assess your long-term business objectives

In order to understand how ready your company is for enterprise business, you need to define what kind of enterprise business you want to engage. What types of businesses are you looking to attract? What features make your product most competitive?

Positioning and messaging your product or platform to achieve enterprise-level objectives would be a great way to get started. Every product feature should have an enterprise-level benefit that could help your customers feel empowered to implement it in their business.

Changing your messaging to reflect your readiness to address customer-facing data processing requirements like GDPR would significantly differentiate against other competitive players who cannot satisfy these regulatory requirements.

Conduct an enterprise readiness audit

Assess the current state of your platform and infrastructure to understand which areas need the most time and resources to deliver enterprise-grade benefits. An enterprise readiness checklist can help you take charge of this assessment exercise. For reference, TinyStacks has compiled a guide for evaluating your enterprise readiness.

Link out to the TinyStacks Enterprise Readiness Checklist article

Assessment areas could be related to your ability to scale, secure, manage, or automate different parts of your product. Also, ensure that you take this assessment as an opportunity to interview your key stakeholders, including your technology partners, to understand their critical concerns with your product.

Making enterprise readiness easier

Don’t let complex deployment processes slow your customer adoption. TinyStacks lets you automate customer deployment, version management, and monitoring to any cloud with infrastructure as code. TinyStacks lets you:

• Templatize your app and its infrastructure so you can deploy to customer VPCs in hours, not weeks

• Host single-tenant cloud instances for customers with automatic VPC peering support.

• Add multi-cloud capability to your app so you can support customers on any cloud.

• Get you a single view into your customer deployments across clouds, regions, and versions.

Schedule a demo with us today to learn how we can help.