Why more businesses will turn to the cloud in 2022
| @intelia | November 10
PaidRight and intelia work together and independently to help businesses better understand their enterprise data. Both companies aim to help drive better business decisions with the increased adoption of advanced analytics solutions. As enterprise data collection continues to be a priority for many businesses the introduction and use of data management platforms is becoming a new trend.
This means more businesses are moving to the cloud to leverage ease of management and scalability. Dealing with huge datasets can be difficult, leveraging cloud-scale services can enable businesses to access insights they weren’t able to on a legacy system. A company like PaidRight would not be able to review every payslip from every employee without the use of cloud services on Google Cloud Platform.
The increase in enterprise data collection
As businesses increase the number of systems, platforms and digitally supported processes in use, the amount of data being created and consumed is exponentially growing. We are seeing organisations capture more and more data, but the effective use of this data is still a challenge. Data can and should be used to drive a better understanding of what’s happening in your business, improve decision making (both better and faster decisions) and improve customer relationships.
With the increase in advanced analytics solutions – especially industry specific and focussed (e.g. PaidRight) – as well as the ease and scalability provided by cloud platforms means that the ability to use this increasing data is easier than ever.
The move to cloud computing
Despite the general move toward cloud computing we do see that some large companies are reluctant to make the move as most have traditionally used on-premise solutions with inhouse technicians and IT leaders.
But as enterprise data continues to grow more companies are migrating to cloud platforms to support their data management needs. This is mainly attributed to ease of management (e.g. no need to manage infrastructure, configuration etc), dynamic pricing and scalability (only pay for what you use, scale out as and when needed), data security and protection (built in ISO compliance and encryption) but also allows for more collaboration, attain better insights through the use of cloud analytics functionality and gain increased efficiency.
One trend noted at Intelia is a considerable shift in thinking from many large organisations around their on-premise and cloud workloads where their architectures are being evolved to cloud-first where the scalability and granular cost control of cloud services are key drivers.
An example of transitioning a large-scale workload to cloud was a project with a large logistics company. Their primary enterprise data warehouse functions were progressively migrated from a legacy on-prem environment into Google Cloud with the main GCP services being BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow.
The benefits of this approach have included operational and capital cost reductions as the legacy system was facing major upgrade costs. Another major benefit was the sheer number of analysts who can now access the system concurrently, the prior system’s per-seat licence model and scalability restrictions being removed with the use of BigQuery.
Leveraging Cloud Scale
Scalability is the measure of a system’s ability to handle varying amounts of work by adding or removing resources from the system. While vertical scaling (adding resources to existing computers) has long been a solution to increasing workloads, the massive data volumes we see from our clients quickly overwhelm such increases. Horizontal scaling or parallelising workloads among many compute instances enables huge data workloads to be split and processed efficiently.
This capability of cloud computing is something that has been key for PaidRight when handling the large datasets that are received from customers. Scaling allows for increased capacity, resilience and performance when needed while providing the best value for customers.
Why is cloud computing relevant to pay compliance?
The ability to analyse every payslip, of every employee of every pay period cannot be achieved without leveraging cloud computing. As PaidRight grows in both employees and customers, the ability to use Google Cloud has created a more structured process, which enables increased predictability and repeatability of deployment.
Most large businesses still use legacy systems for rosters, timesheets and payroll, and these systems are very specialised, focused and good at what they are supposed to do. However, analysis of the data can only be achieved when using cloud computing, as the complexity and volume of data stored in the legacy systems makes it near impossible to gain any valuable insights.