Over the past decade, the cloud has moved from a fringe deployment option designed for small and medium businesses to an enterprise-ready offering that can handle the needs of global businesses or publicly traded companies. However, it’s also likely you’ve heard a lot of hype and exaggeration about the cloud’s game-changing benefits or disruptive design.
Knowing this, when you’re looking at business software, you can’t afford to make decisions on a whim—based on exaggeration or conjecture about benefits you might receive. You need facts, you need proof, and you need honesty. To provide this, we would like to share with you two free hype-free guides that will help you understand what the cloud is, the questions you should ask, and the reasons it may be the best choice for your business.
These two guides—Benefits of the Cloud and Business Intelligence: More Than a Dashboard—will give you a high-level overview into the reasons companies like yours are considering cloud applications and a brief look at business intelligence applications and their role in enhancing applications in the cloud. We invite you to read each of these guides by clicking the links above and also learn more below.
An Introduction to the Cloud
“So, what exactly is the cloud?” This is a relatively common question and often elicits an answer laced with jargon, hype, and exaggeration. In reality, the definition of the “cloud” is simple: computing resources that are provided from a remote location. Ranging from something as simple as email storage to the hosting of complex applications in data centers, cloud computing is akin to renting resources.
In this model, you pay a monthly fee; in turn, your vendor or hosting provider takes over the maintenance and storage on a much larger scale. Through economies of scale, your provider can offer better security and maintenance at lower costs to you.
The entire guide, presented by Acumatica, provides readers an overview of the cloud and explores the first steps you will need to take before deciding to use the cloud for your IT deployment and infrastructure. Specifically, this guide looks to answer the following questions:
- What exactly is the cloud?
- What business applications can and should be run in the cloud?
- What are the differences between SaaS and on-premise business applications?
- What deployment method should you choose—single-tenant or multi-tenant?
- Why should you avoid legacy applications “re-engineered” for the cloud?
- How can you choose the right deployment option for your company?
Learn how cloud computing can improve your business processes by downloading this free guide today.
Business Intelligence beyond Dashboards
Another term that has gained prominence in the last few years—Business Intelligence—has been pitched as a dashboard-based, data visualization platform that helps you make smarter decisions.
While this is close to the point, Business Intelligence is usually undersold, because it does so much more than that. Business Intelligence, or BI, is in fact a robust tool that allows you the ability to connect data from a wide variety of sources, making new connections between business drivers and results, tracking new metrics and key performance indicators in order to provide you real, usable, and powerful insights into your operations.
In this free guide, Acumatica discusses the following facts about BI software and how it can change the way you do business:
- What Business Intelligence is and how it works
- The reporting functionality you should look for in BI
- How BI can combine related data into meaningful metrics and knowledge
- How to analyze on your own terms to get a deeper look into the numbers
Learn more about Business Intelligence by downloading the guide here.
When it Comes to Software, You Can’t Afford Hype
Can the cloud change your business for the better? Yes. Does it live up to the hype? Most of the time. However, when you look at business applications, especially those as important as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) products, you need to make a strategic decision with honest answers—no hype, no buzzwords.
At Clients First Business Solutions, we have been in this business long enough to understand what works and what doesn’t, and we are proud to share these two early guides, courtesy of our friends at Acumatica.
As you continue down your journey to the cloud, we would love to keep you up to date with all the latest news, research, and analysis, as well as give you expert advice on how you can proceed confidently. If you’re ready to learn more about what’s next in your cloud journey, we invite you to contact us for more information.