Mark Vivian, CEO at Claremont

The pandemic bought about years of digital change across all sectors in a matter of months. To stay competitive in this new business environment, organisations need to maintain a dependable suite of applications that have traditionally formed the backbone of organisations: an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and team collaboration applications.

Cloud technology’s capabilities were exploited by every tech leader and, despite the effects of ‘Zoom fatigue,’Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft Teams enabled regular contact and collaboration between employees where they were not used before. These applications were the priority of most organisation’s strategies for business continuity. As a result, though, other business-critical applications, like Enterprise Resource Planning systems, have slipped down the priority list for many.

ERP systems, like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), ensure organisations can invoice their customers, pay their suppliers, pay their staff, track new hires, amongst a myriad other features, and many employees depend on them to do their jobs effectively. Additionally, they need to be running efficiently and organisations could be missing an opportunity to reduce their costs if these systems are not optimised.

Complications of remote work 

For the remote office to function, high levels of IT flexibility and reliability are required. It’s hard enough when the internet or a server goes down in the office, but it can be disorientating and detrimental to productivity whilst working from home.

Add the pressures of home-schooling and caring for family,and working from home can be a stressful experience that heavily depends on technology. The data and applications staff are working with therefore need to be available at all times.

Organisations, therefore, need solutions that provide connectivity options and high levels of uptime reliability. Traditionally, ERP application hosting requirements have been met on-premises with a private data centre or a server room in the same building or on the same site as business operations.

Additionally, when employees aren’t on site, on-premisehosting becomes more complicated. When distributed employees access the company network, additional networking tools are needed to access on-site applications. Most home networks also lack the same security protections found in most workplaces. This heightens the need for strong access controls to help preserve compliance and keep sensitive data secure.

This is where bespoke Managed Server Providers can help businesses navigate their digital transformation needs. They possess the experience to know what additional tooling is required or which environment may be best to host an ERP system for future flexibility. By outsourcing these challenges, businesses and their employees can remain focused on the job they are hired to do and trust the experts to handle things that are out of their realm of expertise.

How to increase your workers’ productivity with tech solutions  

Recent data shows employeesare only 60% as productive in their workplaces as they could be. Despite the effects legacy technology can have on productivity, businesses are often reluctant to replace existing functional operations by updating and upgradingsoftware and hardware

Many of those who begun digital transformation a while agohave hosted their ERP system on an Infrastructure Cloud.

ERP systems, like Oracle EBS, from the reliable backbone of any business, and they can often run more efficiently when configured to run on cloud infrastructure. As Cliff Goodwin, SVP of Oracle Applications development attests, hosting Oracle EBS on cloud infrastructure can “help you save money, gain productivity, and respond to changing business demands with automated, scalable cloud infrastructure.”

Hosting EBS on a cloud platform solves many of the issues that remote access to data poses, whilst being able to add substantial amounts of computing power with relative ease and at a fraction of the cost of buying servers that resideon-premises. When IT teams source their hardware, they need to predict their needs for roughly five years at a time – a lifetime in today’s fast-moving commercial world.

As cloud hosting becomes increasingly popular amongst business leaders, the value of a common approach to data, security, user experience, planning, and budgeting is becoming clear. Smaller businesses do not have the IT systems or budget to maintain multiple systems, and larger companies are now seeing the merits of having cloud services that share a common data and security model, a consistent user experience, and a common innovation cycle.

Specialist cloud partners can fill the gap, boasting custom solutions that offer greater visibility, affordability, and scalability, whilst optimising the security for sensitive business data for niche use cases.

Automating financial functions 

Many businesses rely on a solid foundation offinancial operations; without this, they could not operate.

Statistics back up this observation: A recent TrackVia study found that 59% of companies that made use of the Cloud were more likely to see productivity benefits, and 47% of companies that adopted Cloud technologies confidently expected to be more productive.

Using a cloud-based suite of business applications can have a tremendous effect on uptime reliability to make sure that employees are always able to access the data and applications they need to do their job. Cloud infrastructure is extremely scalable and possesses near-limitless computing power to provide timesaving and error-reducing automation for many monotonous daily tasks. These benefits bring simplicity, order, and transparency to work and give people back more time for improving and innovating.