ERP in the cloud: the different models

ERP and Cloud. Despite all Mistrust the team seems to be gaining ground. Market research, trade press, providers - all are devoting attention to the topic of providing ERP solutions continues to attract a lot of attention. Not least because of the service life and the high investment costs of the systems, this topic is of interest. In addition, flexible use of their ERP solution is increasingly important, especially for users.

In this sense, the various operating models that are already offered are interesting. Popular are already the hosting variant and Application Service Providing (ASP).

hosting is when an ERP system is operated via a "third-party provider". This solution is particularly attractive for companies without IT resources, as they can focus on their main business. Approximately 40% of ERP providers also offer their solution via hosting.

Application Service Providing (ASP) in turn, provides users with software that can be rented as needed. Users can access the systems, which are stored on a separate server, via the internet or private networks. The rental service can include implementation and updates, access control, data backup, storage and support. In addition, usage times, provision quality and costs vary depending on the provider.

cloud computing describes all applications that are offered to the customer via the Internet. The entire operation of the system and maintenance effort remains with the provider. This operator model is already offered by many ERP providers. Within the Cloud computing there are three different concepts:

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a usage concept in which the system is also rented, but can be used location-independently via the web. Here, billing is actually based on resource consumption per user.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) describes a concept in which a part of the infrastructure is made available to the user. Amazon, for example, is very well known for this service, with its products EC2 for computing power and S3 for storage.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the name of the service that offers the user a development space. This offer is attractive, for example, for software development projects with many distributed developers.