Why Make the Move to Digital Science Hosting for Symplectic Elements?
If your institution is currently self-hosting Symplectic Elements, you might be wondering if it is time to transition to a hosted environment. You are not alone—over 80% of our clients globally are already hosted by Digital Science.
Making the move offers significant advantages for your institution, from reducing the burden on your internal IT teams to unlocking exclusive new features. Here is a summary of why it is worth considering the switch.
If you prefer visuals, see Why make the move to Digital Science Hosting (PDF)
Key Benefits of Digital Science Hosting
Access to Hosting-Only Features: Hosted clients will soon have exclusive access to new tools like AI-Assisted CV Imports. This feature automatically extracts structured data from existing CVs, reducing manual data entry and accelerating user onboarding.
Stay Current with Less Effort: Hosted clients typically experience less version lag than self-hosted clients. Your hosting support includes three software upgrades per year, as well as bi-weekly patching. Our team handles all of the technical effort involved in these upgrades, meaning you only need to focus on user testing.
Remove Technical IT Dependencies: Elements is replacing its legacy Lucene search technology with Elasticsearch. By moving to hosting, your local IT team will not have to provision or administer Elasticsearch servers. Furthermore, Digital Science manages all underlying infrastructure, ensuring you never have to worry about end-of-support timelines for older Operating Systems or SQL Server versions.
Faster Support Resolutions: When you are hosted, our support team can (with your permission) log directly into your system to investigate issues. This eliminates the need to request system logs or involve your local IT team to access servers, resulting in much faster ticket resolution times.
Guaranteed Reliability and Security: We provide a 99.5% uptime SLA alongside active, ongoing server monitoring. Your data is protected by nightly backups (retained for up to three months) and a robust 6-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
You Retain Complete Control
Moving to our hosted service does not mean sacrificing control. There is absolutely no loss of functionality between a self-hosted and Digital Science-hosted system.
You will be provided with at least two instances of Elements (Production and Non-production). Most importantly, it is still your system. You retain complete control over your data, system configurations, roles and permissions, and all API or reporting database integrations.
A Smooth, Guided Migration Process
We have successfully performed a large number of hosting migrations. A typical migration takes 2 to 3 months to complete, depending on your availability, and is structured around three simple stages:
Scoping (Days): We work with you to review your current environment, integrations, and data dependencies.
Build (Weeks): We provision the necessary infrastructure and create a complete replica of your current environment.
Switch (1 day per instance): We schedule a cut-over day to leave your current servers behind and switch to the new Digital Science hosted environment, starting with your non-production instance.
Ready to make the move? Transitioning to Digital Science hosting reduces your internal risk, saves time on support, and ensures you get the highest possible return on your Symplectic Elements license. Contact your account manager or our support team today to start scoping your migration.