Top Three Reasons to Leverage the Cloud

Unfortunately, most people wait until something bad happens before they start seriously considering a change to their business management system. For example, did it take your IT staff two months to upgrade your accounting software? Or maybe a brief power outage stopped production in your company for almost two days. Maybe you discovered that your outdated Warehouse Management System won’t work with your upgraded accounting software, but in trying to find the latest version and make them compatible, you discover your system is no longer supported by the software vendor. When you’re running many different business systems that are outdated, or that don’t integrate with each other, it will eventually catch up with you and cause problems.  Shouldn’t there be a way to keep all your systems current, integrated, and safe without having to worry about software and hardware maintenance costs?

But there’s good news – all these problems can be solved with the cloud.  Here are a few ways it can make your life easier:

• Ease of Maintenance – You won’t have to worry about your systems becoming outdated and unsupported, because updates can be made to your software via the cloud.  No need to pay someone to come out and perform maintenance on your systems.
• Disaster Recovery – Your disaster recovery plan just got much easier, too – when you host your data in the cloud, backup and recovery services are simple.  As one of our clients found out, you can even stay up and running after a hurricane with web access to your critical business systems.
• Secure Data – In some cases, your company data will be even more secure in the cloud than it is right now. How many people currently have access to your confidential business information? When data is hosted, it’s easier to control who has access to what.

One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is that it creates a competitive advantage for your business.  Having the flexibility to grow and expand infrastructure as needed without having to spend money on additional hardware is a huge benefit.  Leveraging the power of the cloud will increase agility and allow your business to respond quickly to changes in market demand.

While we’ve already discussed the benefits of having one business management solution, leveraging the cloud will exponentially increase these advantages.  And if you’re considering moving some or all of your business systems to the cloud, you have several options for how to get there.  The public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud are all possibilities, depending on the type of data and systems you want hosted.

For our clients, we recommend a private cloud environment because it minimizes risk and allows for more customization to specific business needs.  If you currently have disparate systems, you may want to consider first choosing an ERP solution that is built with the cloud in mind, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, AX or GP.   These solutions are designed to act as the system of record, and when used along with Dynamics CRM, you’ll never have to worry about data or processes being out of sync again.  This will put you on the road to true business agility, where you’ll have visibility into all areas of your organization and be able to make better decisions proactively.

The first step toward having a single business management solution is choosing a cloud hosting provider who is knowledgeable of your industry and makes sure your processes and technologies are aligned with business goals.  Contact OmniVue today – we can help you find the path toward true business agility, and put the right solutions in place to make it a reality.

by OmniVue, Georgia Microsoft Dynamics Partner