Companies that hesitate to take their operations and data to the cloud fear for their security. After all, cybersecurity threats do not discriminate – whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, the potential for business disruption as a result of breaches or attacks remains.

In the Asia Pacific region, companies receive at least six cybersecurity threats per minute, a Cisco Security Capabilities Benchmark Study of almost 2,000 security leaders across 11 countries showed.

In the Philippines, respondents from the financial services, telecommunications, retail, and software industries – all classified as medium and large enterprises – said they receive as much as 5,000 alerts per day, of which 30 percent turn out to be legitimate.

Industry experts have warned that cybersecurity incidents could cost the Philippine economy $3.5 billion, equivalent to at least one percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Businesses need modern solutions for modern needs, but while most companies have already adopted cloud-based solutions to manage functions such as human resources and customer relationship management, the transition to the cloud at the enterprise level is only now just gaining ground.

In a report titled “Enterprising Moves for Cloud ERP,” Netsuite says that “such is the mission-critical nature of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, the systems on which organizations actually run their business, that there has been a lingering wariness about making the move to the cloud.”

Because some enterprises do not understand ERP, they have held on to unfounded fears on areas such as reliability, latency and security.

But it is an on-premise ERP outage that would create a perfect-storm scenario for the unprepared. The potential for bottom-line damage is too great, and migrating the enterprise to the cloud emerges as the only logical next move.

“Cloud solutions providers live or die on the levels of security, data integrity and reliability of service levels that they can deliver. As such, the investment in infrastructure, data centers and security far surpasses the levels that even the largest enterprises can boast. Moving to the cloud will increase the security and reliability of the enterprise, not threaten them,” NetSuite said in its report.

A solid economic case

The challenge of upgrading legacy on-premise software has been likened to a major surgery on the heart of any enterprise, but there is a solid economic case for the cloud.

Obsolete ERP systems that are meant to empower the business are in fact holding it back. Because a legacy solution does not and cannot support future business needs, enterprises are constrained to incur additional maintenance and support charges.

“In the digital economy, new market opportunities can appear alarmingly fast, as can new competitive threats. Enterprises need to be able to operate in real-time, adapting quickly to meet both new challenges and fresh opportunities…The agility and flexibility of cloud ERP is fitted to the digital economy, while cloud solutions can easily scale up to meet demand as it grows,” NetSuite said.

An organization that continues to rely on an aging system that is virtually on life support – with no more innovations and enhancements – is literally just waiting for that system to die. Cloud ERP adoption is not an option – it is the only choice. Making that shift then becomes a question of when, not if.