ISSUES FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS ON THE CLOUD

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the most comprehensive definition of enterprise application today. The purpose of ERP solutions is to equip enterprises with a tool to optimize their underlying business processes with a seamless, integrated information flow from suppliers through to manufacturing and distribution and the ability to effectively plan and control all resources, necessary in the face of growing consumer demands, globalization and competition. For these reasons, ERP solutions have emerged as the core of successful information management and the enterprise backbone of nearly any organization. Organizations that have successfully implemented the ERP systems are reaping the benefits of having integrating working environment, standardized process and operational benefits to the organization. However, as the market rapidly changes, organizations need new solutions for remaining competitive, such that they will constantly need to improve their business practices and procedures. For this reason the enterprise cloud computing paradigm is becoming attractive as a potential ERP execution environment. Nevertheless, such a transition will require a balance of strategic and operational steps guided by socio-technical considerations, continuous evaluation, and tracking mechanisms.

One of the first issues is that of infrastructure availability. Al-Mashari and Yasser argued that adequate IT infrastructure, hardware and networking are crucial for an ERP system’s success. It is clear that ERP implementation involves a complex transition from legacy information systems and business processes to an integrated IT infrastructure and common business process throughout the organization. Hardware selection is driven by the organization’s choice of an ERP software package. The ERP software vendor generally certifies which hardware (and hardware configurations) must be used to run the ERP system. This factor has always been considered critical. The IaaS offerings hence bear promising, but also challenging future scenarios for the implementation of ERP systems.

One of the ongoing discussions concerning future scenarios considers varying infrastructure requirements and constraints given different workloads and development phases. Recent surveys among companies in North America and Europe with enterprise-wide IT systems showed that nearly all kinds of workloads are seen to be suitable to be transferred to IaaS offerings. Interest in use for production applications is nearly as high as for test and development use. One might think that companies will be much more comfortable with test and development workloads at an external service provider than with productionworkloads, where they must be more cautious. However, respondents in surveys said they were either just as comfortable, or only up to 8% less comfortable, deploying production workloads on “the cloud” as they were deploying test and development workloads. When the responses for all workload types are aggregated together, two-thirds or more of firms are willing to put at least one workload type into an IaaS offering at a service provider. More technical issues for enterprise cloud computing adoption arise when considering the operational characteristics and behaviors of transactional and analytical applications, which extend and underlie the capabilities of ERP.

Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms

ISSUES FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS ON THE CLOUD