Sometimes, events conspire to force your hand. That’s especially true in technology, when new advances and revolutionary approaches collide, providing both tremendous upside opportunity and the potential for laborious, frustrating effort.

Take, for example, the confluence of cloud migration and ERP modernization.

More than 70 percent of companies have now shifted at least some of their operations to public or private clouds, according to industry analyst firm Gartner. The major goals are to reduce infrastructure costs, gain scalability and flexibility in your technology infrastructure, and be able to go faster and be more efficient in making your technology work for the business.

Results would seem to show it’s working. A recent whitepaper by IDC in conjunction with Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading cloud providers, found that AWS customers cut their costs of operations by 51 percent, increased staff productivity by 62 percent, and experienced a 94 percent reduction in downtime.

But putting the applications that used to live on on-premises servers into the cloud carries its own host of challenges. (Our eBook "Migrating to the Cloud: Key Insights and Integration Strategies for Success" can shed more light on combatting those, including committing to agile development, training best practices, and a bite-size approach to eating the cloud-migration elephant.)

But the complexity is compounded when you factor in an ERP modernization plan at the same time.

This so-called cloud-first migration is the plan to adopt a cloud strategy and migrate your ERP to the cloud — be it public, private, or a hybrid combination approach — in one fell swoop. It’s not easy.

For example, a Boomi survey found that 56 percent of businesses said they planned to move their ERP to the cloud at the end of 2020, but fewer than one in five had managed to do it.

That’s not very promising when you’re talking about your most critical business applications and a proven way to derive business impact from them.

You want to take advantage of this “perfect storm” of cloud and modernization technologies to deliver the “perfect opportunity” that will help your organization be more agile, more competitive, and deliver innovative products and services more quickly.

The question is, how? Your data is the answer.

Data is central to a cloud-first strategy, and only a proven integration platform can set the stage for diving headfirst into cloud migration — critical business needs like governance and security alongside data integration, automation, visibility, and synchronization.

To successfully accelerate cloud migration as part of ERP modernization plan, you need to:

Speed integration across pure and hybrid cloud ecosystems
Intelligently connect and synchronize data in real time
Leverage automation to gain visibility of cross-cloud processes

Only with a data-first integration platform can your organization be prepared to take your ERP to the cloud first.

For more insights, download our executive brief, “ERP Modernization: An App and Data Integration Story.”