Why your business will move to the cloud

No company is an island

Businesses operate in an increasingly connected ecosystem; players along the supply chain interlink their processes and help each other innovate, partners stay even more closely in touch with each other, businesses are ever more connected with their clients, etc. The era of locking your IT system up in a basement somewhere and securing it with physical access control is no longer valid – and no longer safe, either.

The road ahead

There are two main ‘roadmaps’ to the cloud:

1. The ‘lift and shift’ approach

For companies following this path, the cloud is a destination for all existing infrastructure and applications. Moving everything to the cloud lets you keep custom apps and systems, gets rid of your infrastructure and provides an engine that you can use to add future innovations, such as cloud-only apps, machine learning, etc. Going to the cloud means that you don’t need to incorporate foundations for these applications in your own environment.

• Advantages: keep your familiar or highly customized environments, tools and applications
• Disadvantages: still requires manual upgrades and changes, potential custom integration with cloud-only tools needed

2. The SaaS approach

Businesses taking this road already have the ‘cloud mentality’, making the cloud a consequence and not a goal in itself. It’s a necessary platform required to use cloud-based vendor tools. It’s important for companies implementing entirely new cloud-based systems to clearly define what they want to do with these systems and fit these goals into the standard processes that come with SaaS. However, SaaS applications are becoming more and more customizable and can be molded to shape your needs.

• Advantages: start from scratch, automatic upgrades, smooth changes, move business functions/entities one-at-a-time, scalable pricing models, always have the latest tech at hand
• Disadvantages: adjustment to new environments and tools

Still a nonbeliever?

delaware is a cloud pioneer as an extreme form of commitment: we rely 100% on the same tools we help our clients implement. All our applications run in the cloud, and most of them are SaaS. We were also the first S/4HANA public cloud user in the professional services sector.

We can attest as a business to the following benefits:

• lower overhead costs;
• improved security;
• better solutions;
• fewer personnel;
• smoother processes;
• more interaction possibilities along the supply chain;
• better operations in general, both B2B and B2C;
• closer connections with customers.

Author: Folker Lamote. You can follow Folker on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.