Clearing Up

EAH Housing and the Cloud

By Leah Etling on Oct 27, 2014 in People

Leslie Dabi, Information Systems Manager at nonprofit developer and manager EAH Housing, had a few reservations when EAH began internal discussions about moving to a SaaS-based model. EAH Housing is the type of hands-on organization who liked being self-hosted – Dabi would handle Yardi server updates herself and enjoyed running custom reports for EAH.

Moving to the cloud made EAH Housing wonder. Would giving up control and maintenance of the corporate servers mean problems would take longer to solve? What would happen if something crashed? Would service requests be handled promptly?

As it turned out, going to the cloud meant that EAH Housing and Dabi get a better night’s sleep.

“I spend less time worrying about server crashes or getting that email at 3 a.m. that we can’t contact the server and everything is down. We’re no longer worrying about blackouts – in the past, if our corporate office went down, all 111 properties in California and Hawaii would go down, just because we were holding our servers in-house. For us to replicate that information to another location wasn’t feasible,” Dabi told us.

Since the move, things have been running smoothly. No outages have taken place. Maintenance is planned well in advance, and EAH Housing is notified accordingly. The Yardi affordable and cloud support teams are readily available and happy to help with any issues.

“They’re very quick. If we need a restoration of a database, it happens now in maybe 15 minutes. I used to do that on my own and back up my own systems, and it took forever for me to do it. For them to do it is much quicker,” Dabi noted. Maintenance and updates typically take place in the early morning hours, so no work-day access is lost.

“It’s been a great experience being hosted. I don’t have to worry about plug-ins or installs. There’s still administration on our end that goes with any new plug-in, such as ensuring permissions and that everything still works. We love being on the cloud.”

The transition to a hosted model has enabled EAH Housing, which is expanding its development and management portfolio, added flexibility to streamline operations and make better use of business intelligence.

“Now we’re concentrating on providing services for our residents, and exploring how we can use Yardi to capture more demographic information,” Dabi noted. As an affordable housing provider in two of the toughest affordable rental markets, EAH Housing wants to explore ways to better serve residents.

2014 was a big year for Dabi and her team. Not only did they make the transition to the cloud, they also upgraded to Yardi Voyager 7S, which has also been a positive move.

“It’s much easier to use. The search functionality is great. You type part of a name into a field and it gives you a drop down list, rather than going to a pick list, which is really nice. Our staff no longer has to contact us to say ‘Where is this report, or where is the reverse charge function?’ They simply type the word charge, and every function pops up,” Dabi said.