Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 34 | Page 67

/////////////////////////////////////////////////// MIGRATING ERP TO THE CLOUD With nearly 70% of organisations migrating their solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to the cloud, Dave Ives, Digital Advisory Executive at Altron Karabina, says that decision-makers need to be cognisant of how to adapt their approach to this mission-critical application. T hanks to the arrival of multi- national data centres in the country, more organisations are examining ways to benefit from the cloud. This has seen the cloud becoming standard business practice in South Africa with companies no longer able to ignore the advantages of going this route. But even so, this has yet to impact migrating ERP to an online environment. Given that Microsoft Dynamics 365 is only expected to be available on the local Azure data centres later this year, this has not hindered a number of South African based companies that have already deployed Dynamics 365 www.intelligentcio.com for finance and operations; however, some companies could be adopting a wait-and- see approach. The business value in making the move sooner rather than later cannot be ignored with so much to be offered in the standard solution. Many customers have seen the challenge of deploying ERP and requiring a burgeoning server and application platform estate to support a large ERP deployment. ‘Out-the-box’ cloud services provided by companies such as Microsoft see them take care of all the infrastructure requirements when it comes to ERP, including t cht lk “ MANY CUSTOMERS HAVE SEEN THE CHALLENGE OF DEPLOYING ERP AND REQUIRING A BURGEONING SERVER AND APPLICATION PLATFORM ESTATE TO SUPPORT A LARGE ERP DEPLOYMENT. INTELLIGENTCIO 67