Why Choose SunSystems

Even when you do everything right, the unexpected can still happen. Natural disasters strike, equipment fails, and human errors occur. Even if you took proactive steps to mitigate risk, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover and ensure actions are quickly and correctly taken to get back online.
And time is seldom on your side.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of the cloud, it’s time to re-evaluate. Decisions that made sense last year, or
even the previous quarter, probably look very different through today’s lens.

Losses caused by critical system failure can be financially staggering—a study by cloud data protection company, Infrascale, reported that the cost of unexpected IT downtime can range anywhere from less than $10,000 per hour to more than $50,000 per hour.1 And downtime can impact more than just revenue and productivity.

Many organizations rely on key resources, such as hardware and applications, to not only help run the business, but also help get back on track after disaster strikes. Unfortunately, as hardware and applications age, they become less adept at meeting business needs and are less reliable resources for disaster recovery. In fact, an aging IT infrastructure can sometimes even be a catalyst for disaster. Some of the dangers of relying on older systems include:
• Hardware failures that require replacement, or hardware ages to the point where the vendor no longer supports it
• Older software (ranging from operating systems to applications) that reaches end-of-life and which needs to be upgraded or replaced
• Application functionality that doesn’t keep up with the changes required for the business to continue functioning—requiring continual customizations and point-to-point integrations

It’s essential that organizations not only address any immediate challenges to maintaining business continuity, but also endeavor to ensure that these challenges don’t occur in the future. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model—where financial applications are hosted in the cloud—is a viable antidote to these potential issues. With a SaaS solution, managing and maintaining the hardware and software (including keeping applications upgraded to the most current release) falls to the service provider—whose entire business model is structured around ensuring all hardware and software resources are operational, reliable, and up to date.

Over time, businesses evolve their enterprise ecosystems to address new needs. While this is the natural progression of enterprise business solutions, it can often create a hodge-podge of disparate systems—some of which are relatively new, others woefully outdated—that only a handful of people understand how to manage and maintain successfully.

But even the people who truly understand all the nuances of the enterprise ecosystem eventually leave the organization. If replacement talent isn’t immediately available, the organization faces a much greater risk of mission-critical systems failures that can result in significant damage to the business and potential loss of revenue.

At the same time, enterprise applications and the systems required to support them are growing increasingly complex. Tight IT budgets and the knowledge and expertise needed to maintain those applications make it increasingly challenging for organizations of all sizes to keep such technology running optimally.

Adopting a cloud application comes with multiple benefits toward addressing skills issues:
• Cloud providers devote significant resources to ensuring their sizeable staff are well-versed in all relevant hardware and software technologies—old and new
• Cloud providers maintain and update comprehensive knowledge bases for their technical staff, ensuring that institutional knowledge is retained

Access to this technical expertise allows organizations to leverage the extensive knowledge and experience of the cloud provider to keep business applications up and running.

Mergers and acquisitions are a common way for organizations to grow, especially in today’s highly competitive markets. Unfortunately, due to their complexity, they often bring numerous immediate challenges that affect virtually all departments. IT teams are often charged with providing the underlying infrastructure that will allow organizations to operate successfully under a new configuration. This can
be a monumental undertaking, and often occurs with little warning, regardless of how much day-to-day work already exists.

Mergers and acquisitions require major changes in organizational makeup. Financial applications that support the organization need to be able to scale to handle changing workloads and provide corporate-wide visibility and accessibility in an evolving geographical footprint. Other factors can further complicate the scenario, such as when the organization that’s acquired or merged is located in a different country with unique reporting and regulatory requirements.

Cloud financial IT teams are seldom able to implement new networking facilities to support new locations while also performing other critical IT functions related to merging multiple organizations—on top of their expected and mission-critical responsibilities around supporting existing infrastructures.

Cloud solutions excel at solving these problems because they’re specifically designed to scale to handle an organization’s growing and varying workloads, as well as be accessible from virtually anywhere on the globe with an internet connection.

Cloud solutions can also be utilized to create a foundation on which a unified view of all financial data can be shared across the extended enterprise to give an organization the level of corporate-wide data visibility required to make informed decisions.