CLEARING THE ERP CLOUDS (REFRESHED FOR 2017)

The SMB Dilemma

In today’s always-on, hyper-connected multi-cloud world, the right technology solutions are essential to improving customer engagement, increasing employee productivity, and creating innovation and differentiation, which are all vital to building and sustaining economic value.

This is particularly true when it comes to managing core business processes, including accounting, financial management, inventory management and human resources. Having the right solution in place to automate core financial functions will save you time and money, and help support business growth objectives.

Many small and medium businesses (SMBs) recognize how critical the right enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is to achieve successful business outcomes. They want to take advantage of modern ERP solutions to gain flexibility and visibility, improve controls and realize the full potential of the business.

But for many SMBs, limited IT resources and budgets are the norm. This makes keeping pace with technology requirements an uphill battle.

Charting A Course In The ERP Clouds

Cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) promises to help SMBs take advantage of modern technology solutions with less cost and complexity, and more flexibility, than traditional on-premise deployments.

But adoption of cloud ERP has lagged in comparison to areas such as CRM, collaboration, and marketing. Businesses have been more hesitant to trust cloud vendors with core transactional systems than with other applications.

As more SMBs see the benefit of cloud in other areas, however, they are increasingly considering “the cloud” for ERP as well. The evolution of private and hybrid clouds, in addition to public, software-as-a-service (SaaS), is spurring cloud ERP adoption. Finally, the list of vendors that offer SMBs cloud ERP solutions keeps growing.

However, more choice can create more confusion. How can you determine which cloud ERP route is right for your business?

This eBook will help you better understand different types of cloud ERP models, determine which model will best align to your company’s strategy, workloads, performance and security needs, and how to evaluate different cloud ERP solutions.

What Exactly Are Cloud Computing And Cloud ERP?

The Term “Cloud Computing” Still Confuses Many People. This Isn’t Surprising, As Different Vendors Define It In Different Ways.

However, there is general agreement in the industry about the basics:

• Cloud environments are built with virtualization and load-balancing technology that allow applications to be deployed and managed across multiple servers and database resources. This enables businesses to easily scale resources up or down as needs change.
• Cloud computing provides access to software, server, storage and other computing resources that businesses provision—and users access—over the Internet or a private network via a browser.
• Cloud data resources reside in the cloud, instead of on individual devices, easing management and security concerns.
• Most cloud vendors take a layered security approach, which includes encryption, key management, strong access controls, and security intelligence to further increase data security.

ERP software that is deployed and run in a cloud environment is classified as cloud ERP.

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