Cloud-ify Your PLM: Key Considerations for Enabling Teamcenter on the Cloud
This blog is created as a response and solution to the above PLM challenge, This is a part of our weekly Wiser Wednesday Challenge on Linkedin – Aimed to add value to the PLM community.
Check out Quiz #13 on our Linkedin page.
Cloud-ify Your PLM: Key Considerations for Enabling Teamcenter on the Cloud
Why Cloud?
Teamcenter can be configured on the cloud to take benefits which we get from the cloud. Implementing TC on the cloud is supported by Siemens and certified on AWS/Azure.
With Teamcenter on Cloud, users can store, manage, and share product data, including CAD models, documents, and BOMs, in a central repository that is accessible from anywhere.
With the traditional deployment of TC has its challenges related to infrastructure management, license management and monitoring of resources etc. With the cloud, we can get rid of these challenges and use the benefits we get from the cloud related to infrastructure management or licensing or monitoring. When we use traditional Teamcenter, it is the customer’s responsibility to store & maintain the applications, physical servers, and data centres on the other hand with the cloud it will be the cloud provider’s responsibility, which reduces the customer overhead.
As per the organizational needs, you can easily add or remove data caches across the globe. Teamcenter on Cloud minimizes the IT burden associated with maintaining the system.
Key considerations that organizations should keep in mind when considering Teamcenter on the cloud:
1. Implementation Model: It’s important to decide which model is preferred i.e., SaaS/PaaS/IaaS. This is one of the key decisions as based on the selected model customers’ responsibilities/costs will change. Each of these has some pros and cons which should be compared before selecting the model. Even customers can decide to go for a hybrid or private cloud instead of a public cloud with these options’ customer gets full flexibility while selecting the implementation model.
2. Scalability: The major benefit of using a Teamcenter on the cloud is that it can dynamically size and scale the deployment as projects need changes. It is important to ensure that the cloud infrastructure can support the expected growth in the number of users, data volumes and system complexity.
3. Performance: Since the data is stored on the cloud, the cloud infrastructures can provide the required level of performance and throughput, to support core PLM functionality such as data retrieval, indexing and search. Customers should perform small POCs with CAD data or some other key use cases on the cloud before concluding on the cloud architecture.
4. Privacy & Data security: It is important to ensure that the cloud partner can provide the latest security features and protections including access control, intrusion detection, encryption of data, etc. which lower your risk of cyberattacks and IP theft.
5. Cloud Provider Selection: There are several cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc. Organizations need to choose the specific provider which fulfils their needs and requirements. It’s also important to check if the cloud provider is certified by Siemens.
6. Cost: Consider the cloud cost model. The actual costs depend on the capacity, security, availability, and performance needs.
7. Integration: It is important to ensure that cloud-based PLM solutions should be integrated with other business applications such as CRM, CAD, and ERP to provide a complete view of the product lifecycle.
8. Automation: With the cloud, we can take benefits related to automation like spinning up the infrastructure with one click. There are various benefits we get from the cloud from the automation perspective which can help for better management of the environment.
9. Monitoring: As part of the TC implementation, it’s very important to consider the features available on the cloud for monitoring. Cloud provides OOTB features for infrastructure monitoring and database monitoring. We can see the graphical representation of server behaviours and pan necessary actions.
10. Containerization: We can check the benefits we can get with Containerization, but the important thing to check is what all components are supported in TC for Containerization.
11. Backup & Recovery: The cloud provides very good support for backup and restoration. Cloud provides various options for backup and recovery and those can be implemented with ease.
12. Disaster Recovery: In PLM applications it is very important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. With the cloud, we get various options to design and implement disaster recovery plans. As part of disaster planning, we can plan to replicate the TC components in other regions which can be used to recover the environment in case of disaster.
Conclusion:
Overall, Teamcenter on Cloud has many advantages, but it is also important for organizations to consider the above factors while deploying Teamcenter on the cloud. Enabling Teamcenter on the cloud requires planning and execution for successful deployment that meets the organizational needs and requirements.
Solution blog by Mohini Pande.
