What is an ERP System?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a business management system, which is gaining a great value in industry especially with small medium enterprises (SMEs). Enterprises require planning, resource allocation, and project goals in order to achieve success. The ERP software plays a very crucial role in driving businesses towards success. Its most important benefits to businesses is the integration, automation, and ability of creating processes that simply allow companies to know how efficiently they are working.

In order to get success, it is very essential to make sure that the business data is safe and there is sufficient compute resources and bandwidth to offer results on time.

Among the Top ERP System Providers are “Tally Solutions” & “SAP” that successfully launched their own powerful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software empowering many businesses and is still continuing.

Key Advantages/Benefits of ERP System to SMEs:

1. Unified Management: ERP software’s is capable of integrating and standardizing various departments, and even multiple branches, which allows company managers to view the individual and united results for unified management.
2. Integrating Financial Information: The company managers are able to track the overall performance of the business very easily, such as business contributed revenues and as the business resources consumed by the type of account.
3. Controlling Customer Orders: The ERP systems allows to centralize the information, so that businesses can keep track of customer orders along with more security and coordination of inventory, production and transportation in a time-saving manner, in order to obtain the history of each and every customer.
4. Standardizing and Accelerating Processes: The ERP systems offer good business practices-based standardized ways. The standardization of processes and using a single integrated system helps companies in saving their valuable time, increasing productivity and rids from manual controls.
5. Reduce Errors: The ERP systems simplify the visibility of flow processes within the company and aids in keeping track of their existence. Such information helps users identify the necessary actions to be taken, as well as to better plan the resources required for its implementation as well as reduces errors which may cause stagnation of capital purchases due to poor plan.

Other Benefits of ERP system to SMEs:

• Process automation and manual controls;
• Complete control over the company’s operations;
• Reduces costs and risks;
• Optimizes the flow of company information;
• Gives real-time view of accuracy and security of data;
• Fraud reduction;
• Rids from re-work;
• Decreases the use of printing paper.

How Cloud Can Help In Solving Business Issues?

Today, cloud computing is one of the buzz topics in the technology industry. Nowadays, every IT company provides some kind of cloud-based services or products for IT experts. Due to the various advantages, companies have realized that cloud-based services can benefit in reducing internal IT costs by decreasing expenditure on software licenses, hardware, storage, and the required maintenance for the same.

Today, every business requires a business management system (ERP) for success, but, can’t afford it due to the high costs associated with it. However, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a solution to get rid of such issues. Cost-effective cloud-based solutions available in the market such as “eNlight Cloud by bodHOST.com” can save up to 60% costs of the company, as it offers “Pay-as-per-Consumption” billing model. Unlike other fixed rate web hosting plans, the eNlight cloud customers are charged only for the resources utilized by their applications.

Hosting an ERP System in the cloud environment offers various advantages to SMEs. Some of them are explained below.

Advantages of Hosting ERP in the Cloud:

Cost Savings: The initial investments cost required for hosting ERP in the cloud requires is so minimum, that enterprises can afford it very easily, aiding them to reduce internal IT costs.

Access Freedom: With solution like eNlight Cloud, company managers and user can access the ERP system from anywhere, instead of operating it from their company desks.

Rids of Maintenance Issues: Since, cloud providers holds the responsibility of upgrading software with updated versions and other maintenance issues of the applications, enterprises no longer have to concern about it. ERP in the cloud permits companies to concentrate on their core business and productivity rather than managing IT infrastructure.

Improved Performance and Accessibility: Hosting ERP in the cloud offers you an improved performance as more data is grasped by virtual servers and help it navigate easily, providing improved accessibility.

More Storage: It offers increased cloud storage space for companies to store their data as compare to private systems.

High Scalability and Flexibility: Hosting ERP in the cloud enables you to scale accordingly, providing you greater flexibility to add more users and data, as customer’s business expands. It also offers real-time data at anytime, anywhere provided there is an Internet connection.

Security: Since, security is the major concern for any business; eNlight Cloud stores client’s data by implementing multiple security layers and measures via an encrypted network, which includes not only isolation of storage but also an adequate provisioning of resources in order to avoid resource sharing.

Today, mobility plays a significant role in the growth of many sectors, may it be the health, education, tourism or IT sector. Day-by-day as the new technologies like cloud computing are emerging, more people are traction by it. With the help of emerging technologies banks worldwide are now able to offer home-based online banking and mobile banking services, providing customers with a handier manner to manage their banking transaction, saving their precious time, while at the same time improving efficiency and the quality of service.

Among the fast growing technologies are BYOD and Mobile Banking. Today, mobile devices are expanding and being used for complex processes such as internet surfing, online shopping as well as for banking.

The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is one of the current trends people are going crazy about. It is a concept that enables users to make use of their own mobile devices to access any kind of information and perform various tasks. It proposes to take benefits of these chances to better the performance of bank customers and, therefore, the efficiency of bank processes.

The main advantage of BYOD is that it supports a mobile and cloud-centric IT strategy, which can offer a lot of benefits the end-user as well as organizations. Especially with collaboration, customers would be able to make financial transactions from their own compatible device through a fully secure and encrypted network.

Whether BYOD has been authorized or not, but when you manage it in a proper way, it isn’t really any big security deal. Also, though the online banking seems to be a convenient way for customers, but there are some disadvantages of online banking.

Cyber criminals are targeting the online banking accounts frequently due to which the fraud schemes are becoming more complex. Since the security threats are rising daily, consumers are very concerned about the mobile banking security as well. As a result, banks require executing sufficient security measures or security layers to protect themselves and diminish the security concerns from consumers mind.

Nowadays, many banks are implementing cloud-based solutions in place for utilizing services such as email filtering, anti-virus and to promote products via streaming media. But, can cloud solutions overcome the fear of mobile banking security?

Does Cloud Hosting Really Help with Mobile Banking Security?

Since, cloud hosting has appeared in the industry, it has been considered as the best and cost-effective solution benefiting various sectors. Basically, the cloud hosting enables users to have access to their data and perform tasks at anytime, from any place, via any mobile devices supporting internet connectivity.

Cloud technology plays a very important role in Banking Sector and offers various benefits without compromising the security. Even though security is the biggest concern for banks and their customers, cloud hosting can still overcome the security issues by implementing multiple security layers, making mobile banking a safer way for customers to make financial transactions.

Within banks, it’s all about the banking application and data. Since both the things are very critical and confidential for banks, it requires implementation of proper security measures or a fully secured cloud strategy to ensure the security of the data and application from hackers. While making a cloud strategy, banks can ensure the following things:

• Find out the most important business functions that can be run in various cloud environments and organize the information by sensitivity.
• Create a complete list of requirements relating to the business functions the bank will be operating in the cloud.
• Additionally, banks can have a fully secured private cloud, as it is stronger than the public cloud and can help banks to retain control over their IT, apply accurate security and while offering reduced complexity, greater flexibility, and all other advantages associated with cloud computing.
• Also, banks can choose to keep their databases inside and move only the SOA-based and multi-tenant architecture applications used by customers and internet staff under the private cloud infrastructure. It can help bank tellers and managers of branch to have access to the required products and applications using a single system or device. It also decreases the requirements such as branch servers as well as the bank staff doesn’t require the latest desktop PC hardware.
• Also, as the private clouds are set up within the banks firewall, the security threats are totally eliminated.

The cloud computing can be divided into three levels depending on the services offered by providers. From the innermost level to the outermost Cloud hosting services include: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. A brief description of each of these levels:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service)

“Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization placed ‘outside’ the equipment used to support operations, this includes information storage, hardware, servers and networking components. Service provider. IaaS is sometimes also referred to as Hardware as a Service or HaaS “

The most obvious advantage of using a IaaS, is to transfer to the supplier management problems related to computer equipment. Another attractive advantage is the reduction of costs, as generally in the technologies associated with cloud computing, to pay only for what is consumed. Infrastructure as a Service also allows scalability virtually automatic and transparent to the consumer, leaving the responsibility to service providers.

Other features are: providing Internet connectivity, policy-based services and the provision of a virtual desktop.

Platform as a Service (PaaS – Platform as a Service)

Cloud computing and its rapid growth has required “include platforms for building and running custom applications, this concept is known as PaaS. PaaS applications are also known as on-demand Web-based or SaaS solutions.

The provider, in addition to solving problems in the hardware infrastructure, the software also handles. The client uses this kind of solutions do not need to install, configure or maintain operating systems, databases and application servers as this is provided under this platform.

A platform as a service (PaaS) solves more problems when compared to a solution that only provides an infrastructure as a service (IaaS), as it has many limitations related to the runtime environment. Among these are the type of system, the programming language (in some cases they may use libraries), the database manager.

Companies like eBay, Google, iTunes, bodhost and YouTube are among those using this model and enable new capabilities and access to new markets through the Web browser, the PaaS offering a more rapid and cost-benefit advantage application development and delivery “.

Software as a Service (SaaS – Software as a Service)

“It is the best known of the levels of cloud computing. SaaS is a software distribution model that provides customers access to it through the network (usually the Internet). Thus, they do not have to worry about the configuration, deployment and maintenance of applications, because all these tasks become the responsibility of the vendor. Distributed applications through a Software as a Service model can reach any company regardless of size or geographic location. “

This model aims to end customers using the software to meet your organization’s processes. The Software as a Service (SaaS) can be described as that application consumed over the Internet, usually through the browser, which payment is conditioned to use it and where the application logic and data reside on the platform of supplier. Examples of SaaS is Google App etc.

Conclusions : 

This technology, as usually has a gradual growth. While it is true that cloud computing is a technology that is already used for some years, yet to be fully absorbed as a central tendency in organizations.

The level of acceptance among organizations vary with the size of these. The medium and small businesses and start implementing solutions based on cloud computing, while large organizations do according to particular needs.

On the other side of the coin, there are the end users, to whom the cloud computing has changed the way they carry out their activities, improving in most cases, and allowing them to collaborate in a different way with other users on different places, access to applications that require from your web browser from virtually any computer, even from mobile devices.

With the quick rise in Cloud Computing use cases and user interest it wasn’t unusual for hosting to be done in the cloud as well. All the benefits of the cloud platform like flexibility, scalability and on-demand resources can be applied effectively to web hosting services and make it a much better alternative to traditional services.

To understand this better, we first look at what cloud computing is? Cloud Computing is the cluster of computers or servers clubbed together and the resources are offered in virtualized portions as requested by the users. This is supplied over the internet under the software as a service (SaaS) model of cloud computing.

Even though the data can be accessed by the users from their own devices which are connected to the internet the data is actually stored at a different location in servers in a data center which is secure and safe. This allows users to do away with the need of maintaining on-premise storage equipments and the need to employ costly administrators for the same leading to reduced costs.

Hosting in the Cloud

We now know how cloud computing is done now let’s take a look at web hosting in the cloud.

Ideally, the web hosting provider provides resources which are available on its server for hosting the websites of the clients. These resources are limited to the extent of the capacity of the server which often results in overloading and eventual crashing of sites. To address this issue you could probably switch to a dedicated server with a much higher resource stock and end up paying a fortune or keep facing issues time and again. But with the cloud you have ample of resources up to the extent of the combined capacity of all the servers in the cloud which is often quite high. The resources are high and the load is balanced equally between all the servers in the cloud allowing you maximum uptime and better site performance.

Now, when you get resources without interruption or downtime and the cost incurred is based on the amount of usage which brings down the unnecessary cost involved in having higher resources which often go unused. This makes cloud hosting server a better option which gives necessary resources at low cost and ensures high uptime as well.

Though cloud & virtualization are the buzzing words in the industry, however, still there are many people are who are still confuse about the concepts of cloud and virtualization. They are still not sure about the differences between both of them.

The concept of cloud hosting and virtualization is very common today. Most of the times people tend to link them with same things. However, the truth is that, both the concepts are different.

The virtualization is an new  IT model that has an ability to separate the core computing functions and technology implementations from the physical hardware of a dedicated server. While, the cloud is a service where computing resources, software’s or data as a service are shared via the Internet as completely opposed to virtualization, which is a part of a physical infrastructure.

Today, many companies are quickly moving on the cloud just with a hope that they will find a solution to all their issues, especially for reducing costs and infrastructure management. But, blinded by the offers provided by some cloud providers, companies don’t realize that some are already partially tied in their own private cloud.

Still some people from the industry don’t realize that they are already in the cloud, just due to the virtualization infrastructure they have developed. Big players like Google, Salesforce, Azure, Amazon, AWS, OpenStack, Hyper-V and VMware offer various tools to build a cloud. These are not the ones that offer cloud services; the word “cloud” covers an array of offers provided by different providers.

The concept of cloud have thrilled many organizations and enterprises, as they don’t need to buy their own hardware or don’t need to hire a professional and highly experienced staff to manage their infrastructure. The main thing that attracted companies was the idea of full data center floating on air, however, they didn’t realized the real drawbacks of moving their data in the public cloud.

It’s not like cloud hosting services cannot benefit companies, but moving into the type of cloud model makes a big difference in terms of advantages. It is a reality that moving your data in the public cloud increases the costs as the term of the service increases.

Also, some of the people think that due to Patriot Act, there is a big risk of hosting their data with cloud providers in USA, as the Act allows the U.S. government to have access to your data anytime they want. However, let me tell you that people have many misconceptions about the U.S. Patriot Act and Data Security, which I will be clearing in my next article.

One more issue that should be considered is regarding the failure of systems. What happens if the system goes down? In such a case, the custody of the company data goes under the provider, the company won’t have any relationship with the data, unless it pays for the data storage service.

Despite the few drawbacks, the cloud services also have a positive side. It can offer a service that would be out of reach with their virtualization platform.  For example, some big cloud players allow organizations to have worldwide servers in various availability zones, which simply mean that if there is an outage, the consequences will be less.

Many people that are not aware about the real concept of cloud and virtualization associate them, however, in reality it is more of a step on the way to it.