Cloud momentum continues to build among financial executives, with more than 60 percent of respondents to a recent (Financial Executives Research Foundation) FERF survey of public and privately-held companies planning to adopt Cloud applications in late 2016 or 2017.
Cloud use is expanding rapidly as companies balance the cost and operational advantages against potential security and privacy concerns.Concerns About Cloud
Data security, cited by over half of the respondents from each group, topped the list of Cloud-related concerns of financial executives. Privacy, a related concern, was expressed second most frequently.
The next five concerns, in order of frequency, were operational:
Response time;Integrating Cloud with existing enterprise applications;The ability to customize the Cloud solution to the company’s unique business requirements;Ensuring system performance; andAvailability of technical support.
Respondents’ security and privacy concerns revolve around the idea of sensitive organizational and customer data being exposed if a third-party provider experiences a cyber breach such as those seen recently at point-of-sale software provider Lightspeed and UK accounting software provider Sage.
Explaining robust security and privacy protections — and potential security advantages of Cloud solutions over on-premise installations — offers an opportunity for cloud providers able to address these concerns effectively.Cloud Systems in Use
While nearly half of the finance leaders responding to the survey indicated less than 25 percent of their company’s systems today are Cloud-based, about one-third of the respondents plan to adopt new Cloud solutions this year, and another fourth plan to implement new solutions in 2017.
For comparison, roughly one-fifth of the survey respondents said 75 to 100 percent of their companies’ current systems were Cloud-based, and less than 10 percent said their company did not use any Cloud solutions.Finance Systems in Use
Finance systems at large publicly held companies have traditionally been on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, while smaller privately held companies tend to use stand-alone accounting systems. Almost two-thirds of the public company respondents to the survey use an on-premise ERP system in finance, and one-third (36 percent) use on-premise enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions.
Nearly half of the private...