No matter what business you’re in, you will likely hear about the cloud almost daily. While cloud technology has been around for years, it’s evolving like on no account before, and while companies of all shapes and sizes are still learning to adapt to the technology, others may not even know why or how to leverage it.
Businesses today aren’t only responsible for managing IT professionals, but also for supporting business growth by driving innovation, reducing costs, and building a strategic advantage. Cloud technology can achieve all of these goals by lowering total costs and freeing up resources so that IT executives can focus on strategic production initiatives, rather than basic information storage.
As a technology that’s rapidly advancing, it can be too easy for misconceptions to increase about the cloud. In fact, misinformation is often a top barrier for companies when considering cloud adoption. From total cost to security, here are the top five cloud ERP myths in 2018, busted.
While many businesses want cloud technology, many are hesitant to invest in it. This is for the reason that many businesses believe they don’t have the resources to manage cloud technology since some current employees may lack the skillset or understanding necessary to use it and require re-training.
Actually, when it comes to the cloud, it takes fewer people to do more work. With a minimal learning curve on hardware and software issues, businesses will benefit from darkening technology without having to re-train or dedicate significant resources to manage it and also freeing up time to work on other projects.
Cost is a common myth when it comes to cloud solutions. Many believe that the cost of upgrading an entire system to the cloud is more expensive than staying on-premise, while others believe that cloud is significantly a lesser amount of expensive. This is a tough myth to crack because either could technically be true. Depending on a number of factors such as the number of applications and data stored, number of users, backup needs, and high availability, cloud ERP could initially cost more up-front. Or, in the vastly greater part of cases, it costs significantly less.
Subscription payments make it much more practical to utilize an ERP solution without having a large up-front cost, in addition to saving on any future downgrade to existing servers. Businesses also tend to lower IT costs with cloud ERP solutions because there are no hardware, software, or licensing fees, and updates are provided by the cloud provider.
ERP solutions generate valuable business data, so it’s only natural that security comes as a top concern with the cloud. Organizations are generally cautious about giving up visibility and control, particularly in place of business-critical applications.
Additionally, utilizing the cloud is a smart disaster recovery solution. No business is immune to disaster. Whether it’s a hurricane, fire, or flood, if your ERP is in the cloud, all information and applications are safe since the cloud always utilizes multiple data centers with geographic disparity.
Until just a few years ago, cloud technologies weren’t as developed or refined, and loads of companies who were early adaptors had to figure out implementation on their own. Stemming from this time period where many cloud technologies were unproven, deployment horror stories emerged, giving cloud solutions a reputation for being burdensome.
This is far from the truth today, and cloud technology is much simpler. Additionally, enterprises no longer have to go it alone. There are many dedicated professional navy teams who help enterprises implement the technology. Many also offer cloud training for IT staff.
Many worry about automation replacing human workers. While cloud computing automates certain tasks, many predict it could actually increase the number of workers in the field. With lower costs and greater ease of use, the growth of cloud computing will enable job growth associated with cloud environments and applications and free up worker’s time since they do not have en route for manage infrastructure that the cloud provider is doing. Job titles and descriptions may change, but the need for human possessions to manage cloud projects remains.