Enterprise applications are a staple for enterprises of all sizes. In recent years, many businesses have made the move to the cloud for running their enterprise applications.
Why have companies made the move to using enterprise cloud software? How can your own organization improve its business management practices by using cloud solutions?
The Needs of Enterprise Businesses
Enterprise businesses have an enormous list of needs that they must account for. From effectively managing staffing requirements for various roles, to procuring the supplies needed to keep operations running smoothly, to managing customer relationships, to tracking income and expenses to verify business solvency and anticipate potential shifts in budget requirements. These are just a small handful of the different types of business processes that enterprises will handle on a daily basis.
To tackle these needs, many enterprise businesses use a mishmash of different business management solutions—leading to inconsistencies in business process workflows and potential redundancies in the solutions used that cause other issues.
How the Cloud Helps Enterprises
Using cloud solutions can help businesses in numerous ways. Some of the most important ones for enterprises include:
- Enabling Remote Work Policies. One of the shortcomings of traditional on-premises enterprise application solutions was letting people access those applications when working from home or abroad. To access the data and applications they needed, they had to connect to a specific database in the office—and structuring things to make this connection both easy and secure can be difficult. With a cloud-based enterprise application, all of the data and resources the employee needs can be kept in a centralized location, making accessing and managing resources easier. With this, employees can freely access the resources they need from anywhere, creating a true mobile office for themselves.
- Improving Collaboration. One of the major issues with remote work policies is that collaborating with people who aren’t in the office is naturally more difficult than with people who are. Cloud enterprise applications help to remove obstacles to collaboration so remote employees are able to communicate and share data with ease. For example, having a centralized database to access data from makes it easier to share files. Meanwhile, having an enterprise-wide cloud communication platform allows employees to share important updates or make requests any time they need to.
- Increasing Scalability. One of the biggest limitations of traditional on-premises solutions is that they are a nightmare to scale up with a rapidly-growing enterprise business. This is because as a business grows, it will need exponentially more computing resources—meaning expensive data center updates and server upgrades. Enterprise applications on the cloud eliminate the headaches associated with scaling up, since the cloud service provider can simply provision more resources as needed—or even scale back easily when workloads are lighter to reduce costs.
Building a Better Business with Enterprise Cloud Solutions
How can an enterprise business use the cloud to improve itself and be more competitive? Here are a few strategies:
- Leverage Enterprise Cloud to Create Work from Home Opportunities. Many modern enterprises are leveraging “work from home” policies to attract and retain talented employees. In fact, according tostatistics cited by CNBC, “70 percent of professionals work remotely… at least one day a week.” Being able to work from home eliminates the commute—allowing employees to have more productive time in their day. It also allows employees who would normally be outside of commuting distance to be employed without having to pay for costly relocation. Data from aStanford study featured in Inc. showed that, “Employee attrition decreased by 50 percent among the telecommuters, they took shorter breaks, had fewer sick days, and took less time off.” In short, using cloud enterprise applications and other resources to enable remote work policies can be a major boon to a business.
- Use Cloud Applications and Platforms to Back up Data. Every enterprise needs a business continuity plan to counter the threat of data loss from accidents, acts of nature, and malicious attacks. When data is corrupted or destroyed because someone hit the wrong key, a server got damaged, or a hacker uploaded encryption ransomware, having a remote backup copy of that data can be a life-saver for an enterprise business. By being able to download the backup quickly, enterprises can minimize disruption from accidental (or intentional) data erasure.
- Integrate a Comprehensive Enterprise Application to Simplify Workflows. Instead of taking dozens of specialized software programs and welding them together into a series of patchy and inconsistent solutions, can use an all-in-one cloud enterprise solution that addresses all aspects of business management. For example, Oracle Cloud is a solution that is tailor-made for enterprises to create a simple and consistent user experience for every business workflow (such as payroll, procurement, invoicing, customer relationship management, human resources, etc.). With an all-in-one cloud enterprise software, issues such as compatibility and inconsistent user interfaces can be eliminated—making business management easier and more consistent.
Need help deploying a comprehensive enterprise cloud software solution for your business? Reach out to the experts at Drivestream to learn more!