It's fair to say that there have been many dramatic changes for most businesses after the Covid-19 pandemic, but none more so than the need for having a robust technology structure for employees. With a huge increase in the number of people working from home, companies have been scrambling to set people up to enable remote access to their systems. If not prepared, this came at a significant risk for companies that did not already have some kind of infrastructure in place to support this.
That means, that it is more important than ever for business to consider moving their archaic on-prem systems to the cloud. Let's explore 5 good reasons for doing so.
1. Lower costs
Every year, it costs to maintain your datacenter if it’s on-prem. Think about the costs associated to server racks, contingency battery backups, cooling for the server room. VPN tunnelling for remote work - the list goes on. Moving to the cloud removes these types of capital costs which allows you to reallocate spending elsewhere in the business, as well as helping you become a more secure business from data standpoint.
2. Security
Working from home is becoming more and more mainstream since the pandemic, which means that more workers than ever before are now connecting to your server remotely. This is something that hackers love - the opportunity and potential access to company servers increases. All it takes is a dodgy attachment to be clicked on by a user and they’ve given a hacker access to your server. With having your data on a cloud, all the data is encrypted during transit, at rest, and in backups. This is often secured with cutting-edge encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), as well as traffic monitors.
3. Accessibility
ERP systems in the cloud are accessible from almost all devices that have an internet connection and a browser - smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. As there’s no .exe like NAV 1.0, 2.9 rc9, there’s no need to worry whether a Windows update will completely break access to your ERP. Some companies feel forced to hold on to old computers and laptops that are running old Windows version as a contingency plan for this - the cloud removes this frustration. It makes it easier for field sales teams to access required information too - no more need to unstable VPN connections!
4. Scalability
The cloud will scale with you to an almost limitless size. On-prem servers don’t. Instead of having to buy more and more server racks as a business grows, an ERP in the cloud will scale with the company growth (it can also reduce in size if the business is going through a clean-up process). This also means that it’s less expensive in during implementation as it can be done remotely with no need to send an implementation team to each site.
5. Updates are much faster and easier
This can be a time-consuming operation that uses a lot of IT staff resources and can cause production delays in on-prem ERP systems. The most troublesome of all are upgrades that aren't fully applied that result in differing software versions for different users and departments. In a cloud ERP system, software updates are sent via the cloud servers, relieving IT staff of the responsibility of continuously upgrading the system. In order to minimise disturbance for system users, security patches, software upgrades, new modules, and more are frequently loaded automatically - typically in the background.
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