Are you Taking Advantage of the Cloud –

Modern business is moving to the cloud. The benefits – which include the lower cost of managing IT infrastructure, anywhere anytime access and unlimited scalability and performance – have begun to outweigh the risks – security and regulatory concerns.

But ERP applications are slightly different. ERP applications contain a business’ most private information, can ERP really be trusted in the cloud?

The good news is that with Microsoft technology the choice is yours. You can decide whether you want to deploy your ERP application in the cloud or on-premise or a hybrid of both. This decision has now become a deployment option: which deployment suits your business best? The decision is no longer even tied to the rental model which the cloud is traditionally associated with. With Microsoft technology, how you pay for your licence is independent to the deployment decision. So you can decide to deploy your ERP application on a server in your business but rent access to that ERP application on a per user per month basis. Conversely, you can decide to buy the licenses for your ERP application upfront and deploy it in the cloud.

This is because Microsoft’s cloud platform – Azure – is deployed and paid for separately to the ERP application. Azure gives you lots of flexibility. For example, with Azure, you can spin up an ERP ready infrastructure in minutes. This is ideal for implementation projects when you want your core team to have access to the application as soon as possible and since you pay for Azure on a transactional basis based on lots of different components – server size, memory, throughput, etc. – it is very inexpensive during the implementation phase since only a limited number of users access the test environment. Before go live, you then can transfer the application on-premise or ramp up the Azure instance so you are never tied to either deployment option, you can flip between the two.
In the main, we are seeing more and more businesses embrace the cloud because in addition to the anywhere anytime access and the unlimited scalability and performance benefits, cloud ERP allows companies to attach other services.
Increasingly ERP applications have become part of an overall communication and productivity solution. The attach service that most companies begin with is Office 365 – Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite which most people are familiar with as Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. – since this is also hosted on Azure. No longer are ERP applications isolated back office products, now they are the foundation to your overall IT solution.

• For example, you can log into your Outlook email and with one click analyze reports from your ERP application within Office 365.
• Or you can be working in your Dynamics ERP application, click a customer phone number and make a Skype video call.
• Or you can create a Team site in SharePoint and pull inventory data or sales data directly from your ERP into the Team site for the team to review and make recommendations on collaboratively.

The communication, collaboration and productivity gains this can realize for your business is only getting better. Recent demonstrations show the direction Microsoft is planning to further converge ERP into the fabric of your business. For example, a user can create a customer quote in their ERP, email it to the customer, the customer can make amendments, email the quote back which the user can then convert into a sales order and ship the goods. All with just a few clicks and email.

Another popular attach service is Dynamics CRM. With a slicker more sales and marketing focused interface which takes full advantage of social media, Dynamics CRM is more suited to sales and marketing professionals than the more finance focused ERP applications. By attaching CRM to ERP, users can run marketing campaigns, track opportunities and take orders using the web, tablet, smartphone or Windows clients which are then passed to the ERP application for invoicing.

We see more attach services coming down the line. Human resources is an excellent example whereby recruitment and employee performance applications can attach into ERP to manage the lifecycle of the employee relationship from hire to retire. The flexibility and expandability of ERP is only going to get better and is one of the key drivers for pushing ERP into the cloud. If your ERP application cannot avail of these features, then now is a good time to take a look at the latest technologies as the power of the cloud is beginning to be fully exploited.

This completes the 5 part blog series focused on addressing the challenges of growing businesses.

What next?
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