Is clinging to old ‘on-premise’ solutions holding your business back?
Whichever way one turns analysts’ forecasts for the future of cloud computing are positively gushing. Gartner says cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016, and IDC predicts that over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5%, five times that of the IT industry as a whole. Clearly, the cloud is destined to have a profound impact on all business functions. And although cloud adoption in the finance function initially lagged behind other functions, such as human resources, sales, and marketing, it is now clearly catching up.
41% of respondents to a recent survey said that they are already using cloud-enabled services in finance, accounting, and financial management. And a further 35% said they are likely to adopt such services in the next 18 months. It’s easy to see why businesses are so effusive about the cloud. The scalability, immediacy, and accessibility of the cloud removes many of the barriers to enterprise deployment, enabling businesses to distribute capability wherever it is needed and engage with larger populations of users. In the case of analytical applications such as budgeting, planning and forecasting, this drives accuracy, enhances management visibility, and accelerates decision-making.
Another survey, the 2015 Society of Information Management’s (SIM) survey, adds weight to the notion that cloud-based solutions are a game changer. This more recent study highlights that “alignment of IT with the business,” together with “business agility,” and “IT time-to-market,” are amongst the top five concerns of CIOs. It also illustrates that businesses are turning to modern cloud-based investments to help them meet the challenge. By contrast, investment in legacy applications has slumped to 15th place.
For organizations courting change, the writing is on the wall. On-premise legacy systems are increasingly irrelevant in an era in which agility and speed of deployment is crucial to organizational success.
To discover why cloud-based strategies are displacing the old on-premises way of doing things sign up for a 30 minute webinar-based interview on 24th February 2015, in which Gary Simon, managing editor of Financial Systems News (FSN) talks exclusively to Michael Gould, Chief Technology Officer of Anaplan.