2022 saw us coming out from continuous lockdowns with limited return to the office, if at all. One thing that has not changed is the reliance that organisations are placing upon their ERP platforms and the ever-increasing requirement to work securely and remotely.
The challenge for organisations has been to continue to stay with an on-premises solution with the added overhead of ensuring security, up to date infrastructure, and being able to have access anywhere, anytime.
The concept of not having an on-premises solution is not new. Organisations worldwide use data centres to host their infrastructure; typically it is your server in a data centre or rack space. Various iterations then came to the forefront namely IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) where you rent the server with your software on it, or PaaS (Platform as a Service) where you rent the server and software according to your requirements.
It therefore comes as no surprise that vendors took the next step to offer SaaS (Software as a Service).
Why is it a good idea to move to SaaS?
With COVID-19, many organisations were faced with the issue of allowing staff to work remotely. Whilst this is not a new concept, the influx of cyber-attacks and the lack of legacy systems to be able to protect has increased the focus of organisations to re-consider moving to a more robust and up to date platform. Typical of the attacks we have seen is ransomware where data is locked out from your ERP platform, and an expensive and time-consuming recovery process normally comes from that.
Cloud has the concept of continuous improvement. This can be represented by annual or bi-annual updates to your ERP platform in the cloud provided by the vendor, thus negating the requirement of the ERP application going through a CAPEX budget process to remain at the latest version.
Cloud service providers typically cover infrastructure within their offerings, such as servers being at a current specification, security updates being applied, server licenses taken care of, back ups and in some cases disaster recovery. This can free up an organisation’s Capital Expense process every 4 to 5 years and spread the cost into an Operational Expense. The same cannot be said for an on-premises solution.
Most people want to be using the latest and greatest technology and software. Therefore, by holding back on upgrading, you could be putting a limit on your resource pool: new employees may not want to come and work for an organisation that has a working practice embedded within old technology, and current employees may want to move to organisations that are keeping up with technological movements.
You also risk the longevity of your working practices when employees that know and manage the older technology move on, leaving your organisation without a subject matter expert for your aging and outdated system.
The culture of not updating technology within an organisation and staying current is one that can have a significant negative impact upon your workforce.
