Committing to the ERP Cloud Part 4: Room to Grow
This is the final part of our 4-part series on shifting your focus to the cloud. If you missed the previous entries check out our blog page to catch up! In the final installment, I wanted to talk a little bit about growth, something that should be happening with all businesses.
Let’s start with the basics. Growing with an on-prem system may not be that difficult to start. Add a couple employees, set up their accounts, give them access, and they are on their way. But what happens when you grow at such a rate that you can’t keep up? Growth envelops everything we have talked about so far. Let’s break it down piece by piece.
Rapid growth can cost you a ton of money. The biggest investment coming in the form of new server hardware to handle a larger data load and paying IT to set it up. The time that this can take to implement could drag on and on with little notice. These costs, year after year, add up very quickly and when it is removed is an instant return on investment. When you move to the cloud, adding and removing employees is as easy as a few mouse clicks. You can scale up or down at will based on your situation. This freedom removes a huge amount of stress and cost when hiring time comes around or your workload increases.
Scalability also touches the point of security. When someone leaves your company or is let go, how do you make sure sensitive information doesn’t go with them? Tracking passwords, log-ins, and access rights can also be tricky with an on-premise system. With a cloud-based ERP, you can lock down access through your browser. You can clear out accounts and add new ones that are secure in minutes. You take security mostly out of your hands and turn it over to the provider whose job it is to make sure their client’s data is bulletproof.
Finally, your time is your money. When it takes weeks to close your books there is clearly something wrong and it’s most likely your servers. With the power of the cloud, you in a sense have unlimited power. If you know you are going to be crunching a ton of data at a certain time all you need to do is upgrade for that period. When you are done just scale back. It’s literally that easy. When you don’t need IT involved, life becomes so much simpler.
My hope is that this help makes your decision easier or at least makes you more comfortable with the idea of making a change. If anything caught your eye, you have any questions, or feel like you are ready to start shopping please reach out to us, we would love to make the transition as smooth as possible for you. You can fill out our contact form or give us a call at 855-913-3228. At Alta Vista Technology we take pride in being part of your solution.