As much as moving to the Cloud has been a hot trend over the past several years with Human Capital Management systems, in today’s world, financial management systems are not far behind.
We’re starting to see the activity significantly ramp up within the financial management system space. So much so, that according to research done by Gartner, the Cloud is expected to become the dominant deployment model across all areas of financial management applications by 2025. Spending on cloud or SaaS-based applications will increase from 30% of the total market spend in 2015 to 47% by 2020.
Which financial systems are organizations shifting to the cloud model and why is this happening—aside from following the trend in HR? 41% of surveyed CFOs said their management teams cannot access the data they need, when they need it. With 74% of business and IT executives saying they need much better real-time analysis of incoming data.
The majority of the legacy financial systems that organizations are utilizing were deployed and designed in the 1980s and 1990s, some of which have been upgraded along the way but are still utilizing an underlying technology developed in the 20th century. Do you remember playing snake on your Nokia flip phone?
Flash forward 20-30 years and smart phones have eliminated a need for a flip phone. Now we have infinite gaming apps to choose from. At the time, flip phones were groundbreaking, but technology has created a completely new way of operating and financial management systems are no exception. As a result, organizations are pining to learn more.
Today, vendors are offering combinations of on-premise, hosted and public cloud applications. These options allow for companies (looking to stay competitive in today’s market) to choose works best for them.
As organizations look to take advantage of the breakthroughs made in technology, there are several issues they need to target within their move.
Financial management system requirements
At first, the hesitancy to move to the cloud was based on concerns of security—why would anyone want to put their organization’s general ledger in the cloud?
According to another survey by Host Analytics, the two biggest concerns in moving to a cloud-based EPM are performance and security.
However, organizations are warming up to the idea, with 88% citing they are more comfortable with it today than they were two or three years ago. As more organizations move their financial management systems to the Cloud, the big concerns have subsided as they’ve seen the benefits far outweigh their original concerns.