4 Cloud ERP Readiness Assessments: Make Sure You’re Prepared to Move Seamlessly to a Cloud ERP

Businesses stand to gain a lot from moving to cloud-based ERPs, such as higher productivity, greater efficiency, and increased security.

But it’s important not to get so eager that you rush into the transition without making sure your organization is ready. Otherwise, you risk carrying over problems from your old system and creating new ones that affect adoption and dilute the impact of implementation. It’s a bit like going on a big vacation without packing anything or putting together an itinerary—maybe you’ll get by just fine, but you’ll probably end up getting lost a lot and spending too much money in the process.

Here are four readiness assessments your organization can use to determine whether it’s ready to make the leap to the cloud.

Cloud Readiness Assessment

Cloud-based ERP software is powerful and complex, and as such, it tends to push a company’s internet infrastructure to the limit. Early on in the process of choosing an ERP solution, you should assess your organization’s systems to make sure they can handle the high number of transactions and connections that a modern ERP will perform.

A good cloud readiness assessment will analyze your infrastructure strategy, identify possible impediments, determine your bandwidth and equipment capacity, and target any security issues that could put your environment at risk.

When you assess your systems and address any potential problems before moving to the cloud, your migration will go more smoothly, your implementation will be more likely to be successful, and you’ll avoid losing time to rework.

A cloud readiness assessment gives you a chance to take a close look at your technology and system governance policies and spot opportunities for improvement.

Tech Readiness Evaluation

In addition to measuring your infrastructure’s ability to handle migration to the cloud, you should also make sure you’ve got the right tech in place to take full advantage of your new ERP’s capabilities. That may involve:

• Choosing and deploying a tool for SSO (single sign-on) and MFA (multi-factor authentication) across your cloud applications, such as Azure Active Directory (AAD).
• Updating your most pivotal apps, such as Excel, Exchange, and SharePoint, to their most recent versions. Old versions of these apps won’t be equipped to leverage the productivity and efficiency tools in your new cloud-based ERP.
• Documenting and updating your integrations, including source and output message formats, integration methods, and message exchange frequency.
• Estimating your peak hourly transaction volume by module, as well as the number of time zones and languages you operate in, to determine how best to allocate resources to your production environment.

Security Assessment

There’s no better time to perform an IT audit than right before implementing a cloud-based ERP. After all, ERP software handles some of your most sensitive and business-critical data, and a breach can make it harder for your customers to trust you moving forward.

While a cloud-based ERP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central or Finance and Supply Chain Management offers a much higher baseline for security than traditional on-premises ERPs, upgrading isn’t a magic trick that instantly patches over your organization’s existing security holes. In fact, if you don’t find and address the vulnerabilities in your system before migrating, you risk carrying many of them over to the new system.

For your new ERP to reach its full security potential, you need to make sure that your servers, workstations, routers, and firewalls are up to snuff. That means bringing in an independent party with fresh eyes and no biases to conduct an audit of your network. A good security auditor will be able to perform vulnerability scans to find weak points and penetration testing to simulate hacks and identify areas for improvement. They should also be able to walk you through each of their findings in detail, giving you practical next steps as necessary.

Data Migration Readiness

As with security, data doesn’t automatically become neat and tidy by moving it to the cloud. If it’s messy now, it’ll be messy when you migrate, and you’ll miss out on the full benefits of your new ERP’s data capabilities. Rather than bringing everything over, take the opportunity to purge irrelevant data and archive historical data that doesn’t need to be readily available. You may also want to re-number or re-code your master files, figure out a strategy for handling your transactional history, and design a new chart of accounts, re-coding historical GL transactions if necessary.

At a high level, preparing your data for migration is a three-step process:

1. Identify. Take an inventory of the systems that will be replaced by your new ERP and identify what data should be migrated, archived, and purged.
2. Cleanse. Make sure your data is correct and complete and address any duplicate data you find.
3. Extract. Using the information you gathered in the first two steps, extract the data for migration.

Sikich can help you get ready for the cloud

A successful ERP implementation requires a lot of prep, which is why it’s helpful to have a partner that can guide you through the process. To learn more about what it takes to upgrade to a cloud ERP, read our ebook or reach out to our team today.