How Cloud ERP is redefining Enterprise Success?

Business process transformation is one of the major ways how cloud technology is aiding digitisation. Realising the pivotal role of the cloud in their business operations, organisations have increasingly embraced it as a preferred platform for running various applications. The enterprise world has witnessed unprecedented digital disruption in recent times, and business environments have become more complex, however at the same time, there are also greater possibilities to streamline them.

Embracing growth-oriented IT best practices is imperative in today’s highly competitive marketplace and simplifying business processes is among the foremost steps in this direction. However, as businesses continue to grow, so do their resources and workloads. Therefore, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application becomes key to gaining visibility and control over all the key processes through a single pane of glass, leading to resources and process optimisation.

While ERP applications have been traditionally deployed on-premises, there are several challenges associated with it, such as:

• Huge upfront capital investment and support and operational costs
• Further costs and efforts on maintenance
• Long hardware procurement and deployment timeline
• Lack of scalability
• Frequent downtimes, among others

We have seen how businesses leverage the cloud effectively for collaboration and business continuity. Growing migration from on-premise deployments and reliance on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based solutions have gained greater prominence post-pandemic. Primary drivers of this trend include resiliency building, cost and process optimisation, achieving agility and scalability, and catering to a distributed workforce.

Reimagining ERP with Cloud

Being central to core processes, ERP is no exception for the ‘cloudification’ of IT systems. According to Emergen Research, the global cloud ERP market size is slated to reach US$ 141.68 billion in 2028. The APAC market is expected to mark the fastest revenue growth rate due to the increasing implementation of cloud ERP solutions across various industries in the region, with India being a key market among other regional counterparts.

Let’s look at some of the major value propositions that Cloud ERP brings to the table.

• Reliability: Cloud-hosted ERP as-a-service is operated and managed by third-party service providers with the required expertise, resources and infrastructure, thereby assuring greater uptime, support and updates. It provides a more reliable alternative to an on-premise system that requires dedicated skilled resources to manage the environment.
• Scalability: Scaling the infrastructure on-premises can be a costly and complicated task for a business. In this environment, businesses often scale slower than the demands. In another instance, they might scale too fast and overspend on extraneous equipment, leading to costly maintenance. In contrast, ERP on Cloud enables enterprises with the freedom to scale up or scale down quickly with a pay-as-you-use model. As a result, cloud ERP eliminates scalability issues that hamper growth for new and smaller businesses.
• Enhanced security: On-premise or cloud, security remains a major concern in both worlds. One of the greatest benefits of cloud ERP is the superior security it offers to businesses of all types and sizes. The robust security frameworks of the cloud strengthen your ERP instance’s security and safeguard critical data. While storing and retrieving classified company data, it becomes crucial that operations remain unaffected at all times. With cloud ERP, businesses don’t have to worry about data breaches because the system tracks all activities and fully encrypts the data.
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Offered on a subscription model, cloud ERP offers significant savings on operating costs as it eliminates recurring expenses and efforts of maintenance, hardware and software updates. Businesses don’t have to spend money on hardware and software hosted in their on-premise data centers. By outsourcing it to a service provider, enterprises can optimise TCO through lower fees for the initial solution and deployment while no longer having to bear the maintenance and upgrade costs.
• Always-available Service Support: Cloud-based ERP services are run by vendors that ensure support is available 24×7. On-premise hosting typically requires the additional purchase of a support package. Whereas on a cloud model, businesses can access the required support round-the-clock, including software upgrades.

As enterprises continue to pursue their digital transformation endeavours, the cloud will play a central role in their IT environments. Going ahead with a cloud-first approach, enterprises will sustain their focus on achieving business outcomes through process transformation, cost and resource optimisation. With an array of benefits it brings, IT leaders will increasingly turn to cloud ERP to enable growth.