Three years ago the cloud was an immature offering and incomplete. Its voice was high pitched and it had acne. But now it is coming into its own with more integration layers and cloud services becoming available. The ecosystem that ERP relies on in the cloud has grown up too, currently even shaving, driving a car and enjoying full-time employment.
Most required ERP services are now cloud-ready, unlike in the past when some key services like CRM, Office and Payroll, for example, needed to be hosted on-premise. Trust levels have significantly increased with many business owners, IT managers and CIOs starting to deploy their entire, integrated ERP onto the cloud.
The cost of cloud-based deployments is dropping, as three of the biggest players compete in the market with their cloud offerings. These include Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Their market competitiveness means they are challenging each other on pricing – good news for cloud adopters as the price has dropped dramatically from three years ago. In fact, it would be true to say prices are dropping on a monthly basis as we see these three giants fighting for market share.
So, deploying ERP to the cloud could possibly be as much as half the cost of on-premise implementation, creating an exponential jump in affordability and cloud adoption rates in the market. New start-up companies can now enjoy the lower cost and faster deployment of their entire ERP ecosystem straight to the cloud, leap-frogging and avoiding on premise infrastructure costs. Welcome to the adulthood of the cloud.
Are you in the cloud already? If not, are you planning your migration soon?
