Have you considered security when migrating enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to the cloud? This is a question you may often hear if you are the chief information security officer (CISO) or the chief information officer (CIO) of an organization that is:

1. Planning to run your existing applications and workloads in a cloud environment, typically a hosted environment but it could also be a migration to a completely new technology. 

2. Already running your most-critical business applications in the cloud, but without a clear understanding of the security challenges it may bring.

Migrating to the cloud is not always a simple process and has many nuances, mainly due to the complexity of business-critical applications or ERP applications.

Cloud ERP Applications

Over time, security and data privacy have become some of the biggest roadblocks for cloud adoption, especially in the space of business-critical applications such as ERP, customer relationship management (CRM) or supply chain management (SCM), due to the critical nature of the data and processes that these applications support. Push-back has relented recently as organizations now have more security-focused tools that they use to build and maintain trust with cloud and application providers. Because of this, migrations to the cloud and hosted environments are happening more often.

Migration to the cloud is not something that happens overnight, especially not for the biggest organizations in the world. It is also not as simple as a “lift and shift” approach that many organizations believe when they begin the project. These organizations run extremely complex and customized business processes, which in many instances cannot be mapped to cloud ERP in software as a service (SaaS) mode. This means that their migration to the cloud starts with running their former on-premise systems in hosted environments.

Because of all of the complexities, ERP applications running in the biggest organizations in the world will typically migrate into hybrid cloud environments. Some business processes and data are executed in the on-premise applications, while other processes are executed in hosted environments with complex integration scenarios.