Migration: What you Should be Asking

What factors and unknowns should your organization be considering in their decision to migrate away from single-tenant, on-prem ERP to a cloud-native SaaS?

Are we migrating to address today’s problems or tomorrow’s uncertainties?

Many organizations pursue cloud migration to relieve immediate pressures such as infrastructure aging, resourcing constraints, or capital cost avoidance. While these drivers are valid, a short-term fix can introduce long-term constraints if future flexibility, evolving business models, and technological shifts are not equally considered. A sound migration strategy should evaluate whether the move meaningfully positions the organization to adapt to regulatory change, growth, workforce transformation, and emerging technologies over a multi-year horizon—not merely solve present-day friction.

What level of control are we willing to forego?

Cloud-native SaaS models transfer significant control over system upgrades, release schedules, architectural decisions, and certain configurations to the vendor. While this can reduce internal maintenance burdens, it may also limit an organization’s ability to pace change, defer disruptive updates, or tailor functionality to operational realities. The trade-off between reduced technical ownership and diminished control should be assessed in the context of governance requirements, customization needs, and tolerance for externally imposed change.

How will long-term costs evolve beyond initial migration savings?

Early cloud business cases often emphasize infrastructure savings and predictable subscription fees, but long-term costs can expand as usage scales and complexity increases. Subscription escalators, required premium modules, integration tooling, data storage, reporting add-ons, and recurring change management efforts can materially impact total cost of ownership over time. A realistic financial assessment should model costs across a full system lifecycle, accounting for growth, organizational change, and vendor pricing dynamics.

Can a standardized SaaS model fully support our complexity?

Organizations with nuanced workflows, industry-specific regulatory obligations, or complex workforce and financial structures may find that standardized SaaS platforms require compromise. Functional gaps may be addressed through workarounds, external tools, or forced process redesign, each carrying operational and change management implications. The question is not whether the platform is robust in general, but whether it can support the organization’s specific complexity without eroding effectiveness or introducing hidden inefficiencies.

What are the risks of vendor lock-in and limited exit options?

Multi-tenant SaaS platforms can create structural dependencies that make future platform changes costly and operationally disruptive. Data portability, proprietary configurations, embedded integrations, and retraining requirements can significantly raise the barrier to exit once a migration is complete. Organizations should understand not only the cost of entering a platform, but also the practical and financial implications of changing direction should priorities or market conditions evolve.

How confident are we in the platform’s relevance over the next decade?

ERP and enterprise platform decisions are long-horizon commitments. What is considered “modern” today may evolve rapidly as architectural paradigms, automation capabilities, and AI-driven models mature. Evaluating a platform’s roadmap, ecosystem strength, and adaptability is essential to avoid premature obsolescence. Confidence should be grounded in the platform’s capacity to evolve meaningfully, not just its current feature set or marketing narrative.

How much operational disruption can we realistically absorb?

Cloud migrations are not purely technical initiatives; they involve reimplementation, process change, retraining, and repeated testing aligned to ongoing vendor release cycles. These demands can place sustained pressure on internal teams, particularly in environments with limited change capacity. An honest assessment of organizational readiness, competing priorities, and tolerance for disruption is critical to ensuring that the migration effort does not undermine day-to-day operations or long-term performance.