Is it obvious to say migrating an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to cloud hosting is a complex undertaking that requires careful planning, execution, and a new mindset? There are not many who would say otherwise and the fact that hundreds of articles are written on the subject proves the point. There are many factors to consider that are technical, while others have nothing to do with coding. The 80-20 rule is applicable where tackling 20 percent of the migration factors addresses 80 percent of the complexities.

The 20 percent can be summed up in these seven technical and non-technical considerations:

1. Alignment

Before initiating the migration, it's essential to align the migration strategy with the organisation's overall business goals and objectives. Considerations include understanding why migration is necessary, what benefits are to be achieved (such as scalability, cost savings, and improved accessibility), and how the migration aligns with long-term IT and business strategies.

2. User Buy-In, Participation, Coordination, and Communication Before, During, and After

One of the most challenging aspects of ERP migrations, or for that matter, just about any ERP change, is the involvement and buy-in of the users. Sure, hosting changes are less user-impacting than, say, ERP functionality changes, but the impact is not to be discounted. It is nearly impossible to migrate without downtime, which can mean a loss of productivity and, ultimately, revenue. ERP systems, by their nature, span multiple departments making it challenging since it is not possible to migrate department by department.

Communication is an essential cornerstone of a successful migration. An org chart and a RACI are excellent tools for mitigating the risk of miss communications or missing key staff and stakeholders. Communication serves as the glue that binds together team members, stakeholders, and all involved.

3. House-Cleaning During the Move

Just as many people throw out unneeded, broken, and old household goods when moving properties, migrating ERPs affords an opportunity to do the same at the digital and organisational levels. Probably one of the most challenging activities is finding the right mix of sun setting, retooling, and copying everything from the old to the new. The decision between sun-setting (retiring) systems and copying some or everything during a migration depends on several factors, including the nature of the systems being migrated, business requirements, technical feasibility, cost considerations, schedules, and most importantly, users’ willingness to dedicate time to cleaning historical data and changing processes. If the time permits do as much cleanup of the ERP’s data as the project permits.

 Communication is an essential cornerstone of a successful migration. Communication serves as the glue that binds together team members, stakeholders, and all involved 

4. Security, Compliance, and Compatibility

Security and compliance considerations can be significantly different in the target-hosting environment. Careful evaluation must be given to the new functionality and security measures protecting data from theft, loss, and manipulation. Question every aspect of data regulations (such as GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) because what may have been in a single geographic area may be traversing geographic boundaries. Review encryption and decryption carefully to avoid locking out yourself; verify certificates and keys before any moves are considered. Many organisations let their guards down during the actual migration process for expediency, and that may lead to unauthorised access to private or sensitive information.

5. To lift and Shift or Greenfield?

Lift and shift (rehosting) involves migrating the existing ERP system to the cloud with minimal modifications. It's quicker but may not fully utilise cloud-native capabilities or potentially work at all. Databases are sensitive to the hosting environment. Consider that the migration may be going from a single-tenant environment to a public, shared environment. In public cases, the provider needs to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) and to do that, they must prevent one tenant from consuming all resources, and this typically takes the form of throttling. Some databases rely on having all the resources made available to them. Take the case of SQL; it will consume all available memory unless prevented. Connectivity from servers to databases appears to function the same on the cloud as on-prem, but it is not always the case. The cloud providers tightly control throughput, which can impact performance. When migrating, enterprises may find themselves defeating the purpose of the public cloud because they must pay for dedicated resources Refactoring or rebuilding can optimise the ERP system to fully leverage the cloud services and resources but to accomplish this, time and money will be needed. Building-to-use cloudnative services offer the primary power of clouds, and those are scalability, elasticity, and flexibility.

6. Licenses and Maintenance

It's crucial to ensure compliance with licensing agreements to avoid legal and financial issues. Many software licenses are based on CPUs, cores, servers, and or users. Moving to a completely different infrastructure will impact licenses, and therefore it is paramount to fully engage suppliers and understand the impacts.

Maintenance contracts may no longer hold true on the cloud and may result in additional costs to terminate existing or potentially not be available at all in the new environment.

7. Administration On-Premises Is Not the Same as Administration on the Cloud

While hosting an ERP on-premises versus in the cloud comes with various differences, there are certain administrative aspects that might remain relatively consistent between the two environments.

Think of capacity management, monitoring, backup and recovery, and refreshes, for example. Is not the cloud provider responsible for making sure the services are always up and running? Don’t clouds automatically include redundancy by default? Often companies make the mistake of thinking and relying on the cloud provider to fulfil the functions and roles of existing IT data centre experts leading to believing the cloud is at fault.

Vastly different is the public cloud from other hosting environments with its almost infinite resources and flexibility. The focus is no longer on managing to fit and run data and applications to avoid performance issues; the focus is now on controlling sprawl and cost. The migration process is a onetime event, typically, but the fine-tuning is never-ending. ERP systems are constantly evolving, and so are the clouds and as such, the new paradigm is change is the new constant.