Things You Can’t Ignore While Migrating Your Accounting Process To Cloud

Various businesses across the world are migrating their accounting workloads to the cloud to streamline their process. The rapid growth of cloud services can be seen by the fact that Gartner predicted a growth of 17 percent for public cloud revenue in 2020.

However, it is not easy to move from traditional methods to become a modern accountancy firm that possesses the benefits of the latest technologies.

Yes, it is right that by moving to the cloud, your accounting process will be more efficient and productive than before. Still, first understanding what cloud accounting is, it’s benefits, its impact on your business, and the associated costs are important.

What is Cloud Accounting?

Whether you know it or not, you are already using the services of cloud in your everyday life.

Cloud accounting is hosting your firm’s applications, data, and workloads to the cloud environment rather than storing it on your desktops. There are various cloud hosting providers in the market that offer services on a subscription basis.

Shifting to the cloud is a major step for your organization. Therefore, understanding its benefits beforehand is essential.

Benefits of Cloud Accounting

1. Advanced Security

Cloud can provide a more secure space to safeguard your financial information than your on-premise setup. With multi-layered security, your data is protected 24×7 against threats like theft, hacking, and breaches.

Most competent cloud hosting provider prevents data from security breaches with advanced security safeguards, some of which include data encryption, multi-factor authentication, Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDPS), DDoS protection, among others.

2. Efficiency

Your productivity on the cloud increases as you can easily access your accounting software from anywhere at any time on any device via an internet connection. Moreover, the cloud service providers ensure maximum availability of the accounting application and data so that your business applications are always functional.

3. Pricing

The cloud hosting providers offer pay-as-you-go plans that fit best to your specific business requirements, with the ability to upscale or downscale resources as per your changing needs.

A well-planned migration would result in the maximum Return of Investment (ROI) for your business. Cloud architecture is designed for maximum utilization at the lowest possible costs with its scalable features.

4. Team Collaboration

Cloud accounting solutions ensure uniformity across all devices as documents are kept in a central database. It allows you and your team to access, share, and edit the accounting files remotely. Therefore, cloud-based accounting is great for team collaboration, as it helps you save both time and effort.

5. Add-on Integration

You can integrate your accounting software with any number of third-party apps for additional business functions such as CRM, ERP, Office Suite, etc. on the cloud to enjoy seamless workflow from a single platform.

Once you have decided that cloud accounting is a perfect match for your business, its time to choose a cloud service provider.

Parameters To Compare Cloud Hosting Providers

Uptime

The right cloud hosting provider will make sure your accounting applications and data are available to you all the time by guaranteeing 99.99% uptime, which means less than 6 minutes downtime in a year.

Hardware Setup

Your business will keep running without any interruptions as a renowned cloud service provider hosts your application on High-Performance Computing (HPC) servers so that you get optimum performance.

Recommended Reading: Things to Look Out for While Choosing A Cloud Service Provider

Backup

Almost every cloud hosting provider offers backup to your financial application and data, but what matters while choosing a provider is the frequency of their backup process. The right cloud service provider would secure your data with continuous and automated data backup.

Business Continuity

Another essential feature for selecting a cloud provider is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR). It is the ability to restore the hosting service without hampering the data if a disruptive event like a natural calamity occurs. Also, make sure that they provide this facility without any additional cost.

Support

Some cloud providers would limit the support to only working hours. However, if you and your team wish to operate for longer hours, go for providers that guarantee round-the-clock customer support via any medium, be it phone, chat, or email, as a part of their hosting services.

Migration Best Practices

A successful cloud migration process requires the timely planning and execution of a well-defined strategy that meets the migration goals, encounters challenges, and predicts business growth. Make sure your cloud migration strategy consists of these steps:

Identify Your Business Motives

Choosing the right cloud specifications is the most advisable strategy while migrating. You should analyze your current IT setup and compare it with the future requirements to match the optimized cloud platform. It is also important to consider the level of build-in support provided and how the user experience would be after migration.

Choose Your Cloud Type

Another factor to consider while migrating your business to the cloud is the deployment model you will be opting for, keeping in mind your business requirements. You can either opt for the public cloud where services are delivered by third-party providers on a shared platform or private cloud where the resources are dedicatedly allocated to one organization.

However, you can also opt for hybrid cloud, which as combination of both private and public cloud. In addition to that, keep factors such as security, scalability, and cost in mind.

Train Your Team

The more knowledgeable your team is, the smoother the migration process would be. But this process must begin at an early stage of the journey, much before you make the final transition to shift your IT landscape to cloud.

Final Note

In the end, whether you are a just-launched startup or amongst the Fortune 500 companies, cloud is the optimal solution for every business. So, familiarize yourself with the concept entirely and do not rush while migrating your business to the cloud.

You should sign up with a cloud hosting provider that fits best per your business requirements and would help optimize your accounting process once you migrate to the cloud. Choosing the right cloud services can turn out to be an economical alternative to the on-premise setup.

For further assistance or queries, connect with our Solutions Consultant at +1-855-223-4887.