Wide-scale urbanization, increasingly scarce energy resources, and overburdened transportation infrastructures have led us to reconsider the way we live today. Businesses are now relying more than ever on technology to help them increase efficiency and productivity. Just like how the advent of the internet transformed the way people work, we’re again ushering in a new era with the emergence of revolutionary digital technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud adoption has become one of the hottest trends in today’s business environment. According to Forbes, 78% of SMEs in the United States will fully adopt cloud technology by 2020.
By eliminating geographical limitations, cloud hosting has allowed businesses to source the best talent, regardless of their physical location. Now, even the smallest of companies can easily expand their operations internationally by creating a unique global staff based on experience and skills. One cloud-hosted system that has taken the business world by storm is Intuit’s revolutionary QuickBooks Enterprise. Packed with a wide array of advanced features, it’s accounting software that has completely transformed the way companies, SMEs, CPAs, and accountants manage their financial and accounting processes.
Over the course of this blog post, we’ll take a look at the various business challenges that can be solved by QuickBooks Enterprise hosting.
Bandwidth Rigidity
As an increasing number of businesses go global, the number of remote employees has also grown exponentially. By making business applications and data accessible at any time and from any device, cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise provides the flexibility businesses need to adopt a BYOD approach. In other words, cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise makes your business more remote and employee-friendly. Utilizing a cloud-based platform to provide safe access to critical business data and applications also helps to create a scalable and cost-effective network environment. Cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise significantly reduces the overhead expenses and hardware costs required to maintain a physical workplace.
Security
An on-premise QuickBooks Enterprise system is susceptible to a wide array of security issues. These include cyber attacks, desktop crashes, power outages, server failures, and natural disasters – all of which can result in the loss of critical business data. While shifting your QuickBooks Enterprise software to the cloud doesn’t completely eliminate these risks, it’s still a much safer solution compared to an on-premise system. With cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise, all your precious business data is stored in Tier 4 data centers, where it’s protected by layers and layers of advanced security measures. These include biometric scanners, video surveillance, redundant power systems, and 24/7 security staff supervision.
Furthermore, to ensure total data security, third-party hosting service providers set up additional security protocols such as multi-level authentication, 256-bit encryptions, intrusion prevention, and detection systems, and much more. Hosting service providers also have robust backup protocols in place so you can easily retrieve and restore data if it gets lost.
Maintenance & Disaster Recovery
We’ve already mentioned that hosting your QuickBooks Enterprise software on the cloud eliminates the need to buy and install a hardware infrastructure. What we haven’t mentioned is that a cloud-hosted solution also liberates you from the responsibility of regularly maintaining your IT infrastructure. With cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise, the servers and other vital IT resources are located off-site, which means that their maintenance is not your concern. That’ll be taken care of by your service provider, who’ll also handle all the software updates (including security).
Eliminating server maintenance and software updates from your list of things to do will leave you with time to focus on the other important aspects of your enterprise. The watertight security and advanced disaster recovery solutions provided by your hosting service provider ensure that your business processes are always running smoothly. In addition to pervading better manageability, cloud computing also enables an organization to achieve economy of scale. By providing anywhere anytime access to business resources, QuickBooks Enterprise Hosting reduces availability and accessibility problems among individual users and SMEs across the world.
Adopting the Latest Business Practices & Technology
In order to stay relevant in today’s fiercely competitive business environment, it’s critical for enterprises to ensure that their employees can adapt and get the most out of the latest technologies. Switching from on-premise QuickBooks Enterprise software to a cloud-hosted one is an excellent way to keep pace with the current technological trends. With a cloud-hosted QuickBooks platform, resources and features are regularly updated so enterprises can consistently deliver innovative solutions to their customers or clients. Cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise also significantly reduces collaboration issues and time delays caused by conflicting file content and formats.
It allows different members of your teams to access and work on the same files simultaneously, with updates being applied in real time. This allows your team to have all-around visibility of their collaborations. Instead of waiting for the bi-annual business meetings to share outdated information and feedback, hosted QuickBooks allows your organization’s different departments to be in sync with each other at all times. Cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise also helps to improve company-client collaborations. All the feedback and personal information your sales team receives from a client is put up on the cloud, where it’s accessible to all personnel of your organization. This transparency leads to subsequent client interactions being smoother. This is bound to improve your business’s service quality, which will lead to enhanced customer loyalty.
Although it might take a little bit of time and effort for your accounting team to get comfortable with a cloud-based platform, it’s a technological change that’s critical for your firm. With so many potential benefits, such as increased efficiency, productivity, and cost savings, shifting QuickBooks Enterprise to the cloud is a no-brainer.
Limited Technical Support
With an on-premises ERP solution, you have very limited options in terms of technical support. If you run into an issue, you can only rely on your IT staff or local professionals to get you out of the sticky situation. You can also hire third-party experts for assistance, but this is generally a very costly solution. With cloud-hosted QuickBooks, however, you don’t have to depend on your local infrastructure for problem-solving. Cloud hosting service providers have dedicated technical support teams which are available to provide assistance 24/7, 365 days a year.
While migration to a cloud-hosted solution can potentially be a time-consuming and complicated process, it definitely eliminates a large number of pressing IT issues. Therefore, it’s no surprise that a growing number of companies are adopting cloud technology. Research by Gartner reveals that by 2020, the cloud services industry will be worth $411 billion.
Mobility
With so many enterprises now gunning for national and global expansion, working remotely has become a necessity rather than a luxury. Accountants want to work from home; CPAs want to access business applications and files from their smartphones and laptops, and business executives need to keep track of what’s going on while they’re on vacation. The days of being bound to an office desk are long gone. In order to stay competitive, businesses need to be accessible to their employees from anywhere, at all times, and on all devices, and cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise enables you to do just that. It essentially puts everyone in an organization on the same page. When the systems within your organization are unified and the operations streamlined, it allows you to standardize your business processes. When your employees, who are spread out over a large network of locations, have access to the same information and are working on the same platform, it naturally becomes easier for them to follow the same processes.
Scalability
The scalability and flexibility provided by cloud-hosted QuickBooks Enterprise also make it an ideal solution for managing planned growth. As your enterprise grows and expands, you can easily and instantly add more servers and users to the platform without having to invest in additional hardware. Furthermore, hosted QuickBooks not only allows you to manage planned growth but also enables you to handle unplanned growth spurts efficiently. For instance, imagine that your product goes viral on social media platforms, and you find yourself inundated with orders. You can easily solve this problem by adding more tools and features to your cloud platform.
Lastly, with hosted QuickBooks Enterprise, you’re also better equipped to deal with seasonal or unexpected slowdowns. If you’re experiencing budget restrictions or downsizing, you can easily slash the number of users and/or remove the least needed tools and features from the service.
Being an Intuit-authorized QuickBooks hosting provider, gotomyerp promises unparalleled security, constant support, and exemplary service uptime. Get in touch with us if you’re seeking top-notch QuickBooks hosting migration or implementation services.
