Abstract
This paper brings to light data security issues and concerns for organizations by moving their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to the cloud. Cloud computing has become the new trend of how organizations conduct business and has enabled them to innovate and compete in a dynamic environment through new and innovative business models. The growing popularity and success of the cloud has led to the emergence of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP systems, a new alternative approach to traditional on-premise ERP systems. Cloud-based ERP has a myriad of benefits for organizations. However, infrastructure engineers need to address data security issues before moving their enterprise applications to the cloud. Cloud-based ERP raises specific concerns about the confidentiality and integrity of the data stored in the cloud. Such concerns that affect the adoption of cloud-based ERP are based on the size of the organization. Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) gain the maximum benefits from cloud-based ERP as many of the concerns around data security are not relevant to them. On the contrary, larger organizations are more cautious in moving their mission critical enterprise applications to the cloud. A hybrid solution where organizations can choose to keep their sensitive applications on-premise while leveraging the benefits of the cloud is proposed in this paper as an effective solution that is gaining momentum and popularity for large organizations.
Highlights
Nowadays, “the cloud” has been a buzzword in the last few years and has caused a revolution in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry
In addition to the myriad of benefits that cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) offers like flexibility, scalability, ease of implementation and cost savings (Utzig et al, 2013), one of the biggest impediments to adopt cloud-based ERP is the risk around data security, namely integrity and confidentiality of the organizations data
In a recent survey conducted by the IDC group, of the 1,100 organizations surveyed on the top inhibitors for cloud-based ERP solutions, 50% of the organizations responded saying security and confidentiality of the data is their primary concern when thinking about moving their enterprise systems to the cloud (Fauscette, 2013) as is stated on Figure 2
Summary
“the cloud” has been a buzzword in the last few years and has caused a revolution in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry. As IBM states “Cloud computing, often referred to as ‘the cloud,’ is the delivery of on-demand computing resources, everything from applications to data centers over the Internet on a pay-for-use basis” (IBM, 2015). This new trend changes the way organizations deploy services, platforms and infrastructure of Information Technologies (IT). According to Gartner, cloud-based services can be defined as “massively scalable system capabilities delivered as a service to external users using Internet technologies” (Gartner, 2015). A study about cloud computing models describes that based on the completeness and abstraction levels of services delivered to the end user, there are
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