5 Ways to Mitigate ERP Cloud Migration Risks

5 Ways to Mitigate ERP Cloud Migration Risks

As a holistic business application, ERP connects all of your company's business units. ERP gathers sensitive business data such as client and partner info, manufacturing processes, invoices, offers and others.

The decision to move your ERP to the cloud is a strategic decision that has long-term effects. It is critical to properly plan it and execute it to avoid any problems in day-to-day operations.

In this article, we are talking about the five ways to mitigate usual ERP cloud migration risks.

Proof of Concept

Large ERP systems with a lot of interconnections and complex workflows can be hard to migrate at once. The suggested approach in those types of situations is a proof of concept (POC) phase.

The goal of POC is to serve as a technical rehearsal for a full migration.

Through the POC phase, we need to:

• investigate local ERP architecture, dependencies and technical requirements;
• select and configure the target environment;
• estimate TCO;
• prepare transition plan;
• allocate resources and go forward with the PoC migration.

The POC phase is not mandatory, although we highly recommend it to avoid uncertainties during the actual migration.

Phased Approach

The success of almost any cloud migration depends on the quality of the initial migration roadmap. If this roadmap is not adequate, the whole project can be at risk.

We differentiate the phased approach by business unit and the phased approach by module.

Phased Approach By Module

With this approach, we focus on one module at a time. By migration module by module, we gain a better understanding of the EPR software and its dependencies. We improve the accuracy, speed, and quality for following modules migration and achieve a series of continuous wins.

Phased Approach By Business Unit

With this approach, we focus on one business unit at a time - we group modules by business unit responsibilities. This way, we better understand your organization, how ERP is used, and what are the most critical functions.

Focus on Data Consistency

Data consistency is one of the most critical parts of ERP cloud migration. If we get any data inconsistencies in the migration, we risk problems that can arise months or even years after the migration.

An example of such a case is Vodafone's UK division; they paid a £4.6 million fine after an ERP data migration failure. During the migration, they moved 28.5 million customer accounts containing over one billion individual data fields. Due to a series of errors, some of the records were not appropriately migrated. A year later, the issue was discovered when multiple prepaid subscribers did not receive service after conducting a payment.

We can conclude that data consistency is vital, and it requires careful orchestration.

We can eliminate data inconsistency risks by:

• creating a clear roadmap for pre-migration data cleansing and consolidation;/li>
• removing duplicate data and minimizing the cloud costs;
• mapping all the crucial data dependencies across workflows;
• prioritizing data batches for migration;
• testing anticipated data flows and integrations before migrating.

Strategic Alignment Within the Organization

ERP plays a vital role across all units in your company. In the success of the ERP cloud migration project, technology is only half of the equation; people and processes are the other half.

The client needs to ensure strong support from the management to support change management during the technical implementation. Without this, end-user adoption might be problematic.

Security

Security is one of the most critical factors when choosing to move ERP to the cloud. ERP systems gather holistic business data of your company, so security is, of course, one of the key concerns.

When migrating ERP to the cloud, we recommend:

• IAM controls;
• properly configured firewalls;
• log audits;
• strong authentication controls;
• SoD (segregation of duties) policies;
• regular vulnerability assessments.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about five main concerns of companies moving their ERP to the cloud. ERP is a holistic business application, and it requires a lot of effort and planning to execute it properly. As in any other cloud migration project, the most important thing is to discover and analyze the old solution before the migration and understand new requirements. Based on the analysis, we create a clear roadmap with milestones and goals to address all potential problems.

As AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies of every industry and size solve their infrastructure problems with cloud migration.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@sedmiodjel.com.

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