For the past nearly 50 (yes, really) years, businesses building and maintaining their own onsite IT infrastructure was the only game in town. Cloud computing has changed all that. A whopping 61% of businesses migrated at least some of their workloads to the cloud in 2020. Likely your business is already running more than one SaaS hosted application (Microsoft 365 or Dropbox, anyone?), and it’s a guarantee that your employees are. However, many Sage 300 users remain tied to the onsite deployment and the heavy IT burden and costs that go with it. Now is an excellent time to move your Sage 300 to a hosted model. Here are three reasons why you shouldn’t wait any longer to make the move.
1. Take control of your business
Sage 300 is likely the backbone of your business operations, with all accounting, sales, inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, project management, and other functions managed through the application. Even short periods of downtime can be devastating, impacting your ability to service customers and zapping employee productivity. Should your server crash, it could take days or weeks to repair or replace it, costing tens of thousands (or more) in expenses and lost revenue. If resiliency, system performance, or security breaches become issues, your organization risks losing ground — and customers — to the competition. In short, Sage 300 is mission-critical, which makes the cloud an ideal place to protect it.
With a hosted Sage 300 ERP model, your company’s instance of Sage 300 is hosted on a private cloud services provider’s (CSP) server in a highly secure environment. Private CSPs host your entire production environment in a stable and secure location with 24x7x365 monitoring and support. With near 100% availability guarantees, hourly backup snapshots, and professional disaster recovery services, your hosted Sage 300 data will be safe, and your organization can continue operations, even in the event of a disaster.
2. Increase the value of your company
If you are considering merger and acquisition opportunities, an IPO, or a business continuity strategy, you’ll want to maximize your company’s value in every possible way. A company with a bulky in-house computer system — especially when it runs the ERP — could be seen as risky by potential investors. There’s some mystery surrounding an internally hosted IT infrastructure that makes it more difficult for investors to access, understand, value, and maintain going forward.In short, investors demand visibility and accessibility — two things most in-house ERP deployments lack.
With the vast majority of workloads either in the cloud or moving to the cloud, the cloud becomes the place to park your Sage 300. With your hosting company handling all maintenance and support of the system, a budgetable monthly cost, and the cloud deployment providing anytime, anywhere access, investors have a clearer, more concise vision of your operation that’s extremely valuable.
3. Improve employee productivity
Labor is the single largest expense for most companies, so it’s of strategic advantage when you can optimize every hour worked. Is it really in your company’s best interest to continue to host and maintain Sage 300 on premise? In addition to the staff time required to keep it running optimally, there’s also the “window within a window” remote access inconvenience that zaps performance and wastes time. Also, in this tight labor market, it’s increasingly difficult (and expensive) to hire and retain talented IT professionals. In short, your human capital may be better spent on activities other than maintaining your Sage 300 ERP application in house.
Moving your Sage 300 to a hosted cloud deployment model allows you reallocate IT resources to focus more on growing the business and less on maintaining and updating technology. In addition, cloud deployments provide convenient anytime/anywhere access for your staff — something that proved invaluable during the pandemic. The flexibility, reliability, security, and accessibility provided through a hosted ERP scenario can boost overall productivity and allow you to focus resources more strategically.
Your company’s investment in Sage 300 is significant, spans many years — and will perform well for many years to come. But your method of deployment could use an update. Cloud Hosted ERP offers numerous benefits to growing companies, including improved security and backup, better visibility and accessibility, and enhanced employee productivity. As a Sage Cloud Hosting specialist, Cloud at Work understands Sage 300 and will work with you and your Sage partner to make the transition to hosting simple, straightforward, and seamless. Contact us with your questions.