WHY YOU SHOULD MIGRATE YOUR ERP TO THE GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM?

ERP solutions are the most widely implemented information technologies used to elevate business processes in a modern enterprise. ERP systems are some of the most important needed technology pieces to help with business operations and management. They are meant to unify organizations through the maintenance of a large database that stores, shares, and disseminates data in different business functions.

As businesses look for ways to increase efficiency, the adoption of cloud computing is increasing worldwide. More businesses particularly small and medium-sized businesses adopt the GCP cloud as the new normal because it reduces the cost of ownership, unblocks barriers to better functionality, and allows corporate agility, better security, and reduced IT dependency.

As cloud environments are different from traditional IT environments, organizations wanting to move such functions or processes to the cloud face several challenges.

It’s the time! As more businesses move their ERP to the cloud, find out the key benefits of a GCP and why you should make the switch.

CLOUD ADOPTION

The Cloud has become a quick potential place to consider for ERP deployments. And with the many possible ERP options from off the shelf to custom ones, Organizations should consider ERP solutions with cloud deployment that suit their budget and needs.

Key Questions

Deploying ERP on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers the opportunity to transform your business and build a new intelligent enterprise. But, before embarking on the GCP cloud journey, a series of questions to ask are

1. How will ERP on GCP reduce my TCO?
2. What is the right GCP architecture for meeting business service level agreements (SLAs)?

3. How can I migrate ERP to GCP?

4. Who can provide end-to-end managed services for my ERP services on GCP?

5 . How are security, risk and compliance ensured on GCP?

The main objective of the blog is to provide insights into the above questions and give a brief introduction to how you can migrate your ERP to the GCP cloud.

HOW WILL MIGRATING YOUR ERP TO GCP HELP REDUCE YOUR TCO COSTS?

Upfront infrastructure and operating costs

GCP provides better performance with significantly lower costs. The pricing structure is simple, predictable, and transparent in every way. Only pay for what you use and scale as your organization grows. You can also gain more visibility and control to lower costs with billing and management tools and optimize your costs.

Some offerings include

1. Per Second billing: While other cloud providers charge for services by the hour, Google charges for all services per second, which can add up to major savings when instances are frequently started and stopped.
2. Sustained use discounts: these discounts are automatically applied and are qualified for running a virtual-machine instance for a significant portion of the billing month(more than 25% of a month).
3. No upfront costs: you do not require prepayments or commitments to use any GCP services.
4. Custom VM types; you can create your custom server type, unlike Azure where one has to choose from existing configurations strictly.
5. GCP preemptible VMs: save up to 79% on workloads that can be interrupted, such as data mining and data processing.

GCP also has an excellent feature of doing budget control. It collects all information concerning usage and presents it transparently. And much more, GCP lets users set budget alerts so that they don’t exceed your budget limit. The budget can be planned to the penny and split accordingly between particular projects and services. The user gets alerts of reaching a pre-set threshold or usage forecasts by email.

HOW IS GCP ARCHITECTURE A SUPERIOR OPTION IN HELPING ORGANIZATIONS TO MEET BUSINESS-LEVEL AGREEMENTS(SLAs)

Security-focused: Security at all levels is top of mind and paramount in Google’s design, From custom hardware to encrypting data by default in transit and rest. Google cloud protects your data, applications, infrastructure, and customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse with the same infrastructure and security services that Google uses.

Superior network: Google has its private network which is twice the size of Azure and AWS. It offers a superior high-speed network with low latency which caches content close to the user. The network uses advanced software-defined networking and edge caching services to deliver fast consistent and scalable performance.

Resilient Infrastructure and unmatched scale with zero downtime: GCP has compute solutions that can scale and grow to meet the ERP customer needs. Where applications require additional compute resources, managed instance groups can automatically scale the number of instances in the group Google cloud also ensures a reliable cloud infrastructure by building safety nets to their applications and network infrastructure assuming that any element is fallible by enforcing redundancy and robust failover capabilities.

Accessibility. GCP ERP users can access business information in real-time, from anywhere and on any device. This ensures employees across the organization are working with the same data, no matter the business unit or location, and can make decisions faster and more confidently.

Outstanding Availability and Uptime: Google Cloud has a commitment to achieving uptime upwards of 99.99% that is reflected in their Compute Engine Service Level Agreement (SLA), where any dip below a monthly uptime of 99.99% will result in financial credit.

HOW DO YOU MIGRATE YOUR ERP TO THE GCP PLATFORM

Migrating to the cloud can be complex, time-consuming, and risky, especially when you have hundreds or thousands of existing workloads to move. Determining the cost and benefits requires a strategic, holistic approach, so it’s important to understand and account for all of the factors that go into a migration.

But the journey can be smooth and fast if good planning is done with tried-and-true methods. Some steps to take include

• Assess: Identify your team, get an overview of your IT landscape, and decide which applications to move first.
• Plan: Choose one or more migration strategies, consider a streaming-based solution, and test your applications’ performance in the cloud.
• Migrate: Use a phased, agile approach that allows you to revert bathe on-premises configuration if necessary.
• Optimize: Fine-tune your cloud environment to align usage with demand and implement capabilities like cost controls and governance tools.

GCP offers easy live migration of virtual machines: It provides mechanisms for migration of servers from a third-party service provider or even on-premise. You can migrate every workload faster and build faster on the cloud, achieve operational efficiency, improve application performance and availability. Live migration also reduces infrastructure downtime. Migration happens in the background with ease and allows you to start using the ERP as data is being moved.

HOW IS SECURITY, RISK, AND COMPLIANCE ENSURED ON GCP?

GCP has monitoring tools that give visibility to user activity and access monitoring, consolidated view of all data within your GCP instances, robust reporting & proactive monitoring, and audit trails for all activities.

This capability helps detect malicious and anonymous user behavior. This is important especially because the day-to-day functioning of most organizations requires employees of various trust levels and roles to have access to the ERP solutions as well as the highly sensitive data that resides in them. Due to the criticality of ERP solutions, configuring your current infrastructure to incorporate the GCP OPs agent for continuous monitoring to ensure no unauthorized or malicious activity is being important.

Google Cloud Platform console also allows you to create uptime checks and alerting policies completely for free to monitor your Google infrastructure and it has integrations with multiple services such as Slack, PagerDuty, Google Workspace, Gmail, SMS, and Office 365 to configure alert policies based on set metrics to send alert notifications (firing alarms)/pre-emptive alerts in case of anything.

BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY

Your company ERP must have a required disaster recovery for both user machines and the ERP Server applications. This is very important because users interact with the ERP and generate data that is stored on their desktops. The desktop of a very critical user could crash, get stolen, damaged, etc. with reports and insights that can be hard to replicate. The same way the ERP server, even when it’s on the cloud, could be corrupted or data changed, lost, deleted, through accident or malice. You want to be able to restore and recover the business operations quickly and with minimal data loss.

Just because your systems and applications run on the cloud does not mean you no longer need backup! This is a common myth and misconception some businesses are exposed to. Errors from commission or omission, or human errors could lead to systems malfunction, failures, deleted data which could spell doom or disaster for any organization.

In this day and age where everyone is a target for cybercriminals, Google Cloud is the way to go for a variety of reasons. By using Google cloud storage (GCS) buckets you significantly reduce the risk of data loss which saves you from unnecessary headaches down the road, including the possibility of a customer/client suing you over data breaches.

Some cloud-based backups include:

Google cloud storage: Google Cloud Storage allows you to store, access, and manage your unstructured data such as videos, images, and documents on Google’s infrastructure. With support for unlimited file types including executable files and operating system images, Google Cloud Storage offers solutions for any workloads with its Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and archive options. It is simple, reliable, cost-effective with a cost of as low as $0.0012 per GB/month, it is secure with data being encrypted at rest.

Scheduled and Regular Snapshots — are used to create an entire architectural instance/copy of an application, disk, or system, this feature lets you create automated snapshots as well as manage snapshots retention. It is designed to reduce errors and save time, so you can focus on initiatives that create value for your business. Snapshots are almost an instantaneous copy of a dataset to be taken in a live environment. This copy can then be made available for recovery but also to other systems often as a clone copy for testing and development environments.

Systems-level Backups — these are fast replication backups that are created by using the backup system utility. Commonly referred to as image-based backups. This is a great way to save your storage and save time and computing resources.

Machine images store all the configuration, metadata, permissions, and data needed from disks to create a virtual machine instance. Machine images are ideal resources for disk backups as well assistance cloningoning and replication.

Shared file storage: ERP systems can use shared file storage to fulfill any high availability and disaster recovery requirements. Shared file systems can be combined with appropriately chosen Cloud Storage buckets (multi-region, dual region) to ensure the availability of data backups across zones and regions.

CONCLUSION

As businesses look for ways to increase efficiency, the adoption of cloud computing is increasing worldwide. The cloud provides a scalable, flexible, and secure platform for organizations to host and deploy applications and services.

Google Cloud provides several accelerators to assist with the move to the cloud. For typical lift-and-shift operations, Google Cloud provides Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly known as Velostrata). This uses streaming technology to minimize migration time, and it provides rightsizing recommendations before you begin, to help you choose appropriate instance types.