The Impact of Cloud Adoption

Version 1 recently published ‘So, You’re Ready to Move Your ERP to the Cloud’, a resource to inform enterprise organisations of the most commonly overlooked factors to consider ahead of migrating your ERP to the Cloud.

The following blog post is the first instalment in a series that will look at the individual factors from the resource in more detail, starting with the potential impact of Cloud Adoption on your organisation.

Cloud Adoption – Have You Done This Before?

The first thing to consider before migrating your ERP to Cloud, is the effect that the Cloud may have on your organisation if this is something that you haven’t experienced before. It is critically important to be armed with all the information you need from the beginning, and to proactively question whether your solution is made up of the right factors for your organisation’s unique demands, strategic initiatives, current and future business requirements.

There are dozens of factors to consider to understand how Cloud Adoption may affect your organisation, and in the following post, we will focus specifically on three important areas:

1. Does The Cloud Vendor Offer What You Need?
2. How Will Cloud Responsibilities Affect Your Organisation?
3. How Will Updates to the Cloud Affect Your Organisation?

1. Does The Cloud Vendor Offer What You Need?

Whether migrating your ERP software from on-premise to IaaS/PaaS or implementing your ERP as SaaS, there are unique factors to consider for each. Before progressing along the journey to the Cloud, if an organisation hasn’t implemented Cloud before, there are key factors that to explore to ensure you avoid mistakes and misassumptions.

For example:

• Does the Cloud provider supply the Cloud solutions and services, at the levels of control required by your organisation?
• Do you perhaps, by dint of your own regulatory requirements, have the ability to audit their Cloud facilities?
• Relating to security and compliance, are there necessary certifications in place in the regions you plan to deploy?
• Does the Cloud provider allow you run penetration testing for the services you plan to subscribe for?

2. How Will Responsibilities for the Cloud Affect Your Organisation?

A key factor to clarify before migrating to the Cloud is what the Cloud vendor is responsible for following the migration, versus what your organisation is responsible for. The scope of this is completely different based on the Cloud services implemented e.g. SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS.

It is important to know what responsibilities in the Cloud fall to your organisation, or stay with the Cloud vendor before you migrate, in order to prepare the roles, skills and teams that may be required.

3. How Will Updates to the Cloud Affect Your Organisation?

One of the biggest surprises that organisations experience on the journey to Cloud, is the newly shared control with the Cloud Vendor. Planned outages and updates for Cloud services are completely non-negotiable for customers once they move to the Cloud.

Regularly organisations new to the Cloud wrongly assume they can skip or defer Cloud updates and outages for example due to their weekly batch runs or month-end processes, clashing with the scheduled maintenance by Cloud providers.

In the on-premise world, this is dealt with by the Production Operation teams and Business Systems Owners. This new world means that it is necessary to factor in the Cloud providers role and activities in the operation of your business, accepting that they are providing this Cloud at scale by having ‘a one size fits all’.

As a further example, responsibility for encryption of your data within a database in the Cloud changes completely if an organisation uses Infrastructure-as-a-Service and deploys a database there – in this case the organisation are responsible, versus SaaS, where the Cloud provider is responsible.

Conclusion – It’s a Journey not a Destination

It’s important to look at the bigger picture with Cloud Adoption when moving your ERP to the Cloud. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to migrating from on-premise ERP to ERP on the Cloud, any flavour.  This, coupled with short, medium and long-term future plans for cloud – Cloud-First policies and the various approaches to structuring technology decision-making across an organisation makes it hard to prescribe what every organisation’s cloud journey will look like, and how each phase impacts the broader organisation along the way.

This post covered some important factors for you to consider before migrating your ERP to the Cloud, but it is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of migrating your ERP to the Cloud safely and successfully.

If you would like to learn more about commonly overlooked factors when migrating your ERP to the Cloud, download your copy of ‘So, You’re Ready to Move Your ERP to the Cloud’ here.

About Version 1

The go-to-partner for Oracle E-Business Suite, ERP Cloud and JD Edwards customers.

In order to mitigate risk for our customers Cloud Adoption journey, Version 1 has a Cloud Reference Architecture for Oracle that allows customers to map all of their Oracle Cloud adoption concerns across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. We are completely au fait with developing Cloud operating models for all the major Cloud providers so that we can ensure all your organisation’s roles and responsibility are designed in and planned for. We also have knowledge across all the relevant Cloud Delivery Agreements, Contracts. SLAs etc for Oracle IaaS, PaaS and SaaS so that you can develop a model that does not adversely affect the smooth running of your business system when you transition to Cloud.

To learn more about our award-winning ERP services, please visit version1.com/it-service/erp/

Download ‘So, You’re Ready to Move Your ERP to the Cloud’ here