As more and more organizations start considering making the move to Cloud, it’s important to get informed by asking the right questions before making a decision. Margaret Harrist, Director of Content Strategy and Implementation at Oracle, wrote an article for Forbes advising CFO’s 6 questions to ask before moving to Cloud.
1) Is It a True Cloud?
When moving all or part of your company’s ERP system to the cloud, make sure that it takes full advantage of cloud capabilities. If solutions are not rewritten for the Cloud, applications won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change, and your system will not be sustainable for the future. That defeats the entire purpose of moving to the Cloud.
2) Is the Vendor Financially Stable?
Before committing to a Cloud vendor, make sure that they are financially stable. If the vendor goes out of business, all of your critical financial data that was moved to Cloud is at risk. The same can be said if the vendor’s product includes components from third parties. It’s important to make sure those third parties aren’t going anywhere either.
3) What’s the Product Roadmap?
If your Cloud ERP vendor isn’t willing to invest in product research and development, you will be left behind as time goes on. Today’s workforce is constantly changing, so Cloud ERP needs to keep up with the fast pace. Get to know what’s on the product roadmap for your Cloud ERP vendor so you can be sure that continuous development is a priority.
4) Are the Vendor’s ERP and Other Components Integrated?
It can be a potential issue if a vendor’s ERP, and other related enterprise services, comprise technologies from acquired companies. As a result, you might get stuck integrating incompatible technology stacks and handling disjointed upgrade cycles. It’s important to ensure important connection points to avoid data fragmentation, costly integrations and security risks.
5) Will We Need to Integrate Third-Party Applications?
Beware of thin EPM solutions that must be supplemented by third-party offerings. Hari Sankar, Oracle Vice President of Product Management warns that a planning solution that doesn’t include critical areas of EPM will require you to add them separately and do the work to integrate them into your ERP.
6) Does the Cloud ERP Product Scale Sufficiently?
No matter the size of your business, you need to be able to manage your financial plans dynamically. It’s critical that your financial planning service can scale to support users. This will require ongoing input from people within the company that have valuable insights.
To learn more about what questions to ask before moving to cloud, check out the full article from Forbes here.