Johannesburg, 01 Oct 2020
Had the COVID-19 pandemic occurred prior to the large uptake of cloud technology, the economic fallout would have been far worse.
That’s the view of Pieter Bensch, Executive Vice-President at Sage Africa & Middle East, who adds that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had the effect of fast-tracking several technology trends that had been apparent before the start of 2020.
One of the most important of these was the move to the cloud.
“When the lockdown hit, businesses were suddenly faced with having to manage a remote workforce over dispersed networks. Those that were already using cloud-based solutions prior to the outbreak were better able to successfully navigate these challenges,” Bensch adds.
Arthur Goldstuck, managing director at South African research firm World Wide Worx, agrees.
He points to recent research that has shown that organisations that were already in the cloud and using cloud-based financial management solutions, have generally had an easier time of dealing with the lockdown and the ongoing recession. In fact, almost half of the survey respondents claimed to have experienced moderate to strong growth in organisational performance over the past year largely as a result of their shift to the cloud.
“We were already witnessing a shift in the roles and responsibilities of financial decision-makers and the finance department’s adoption of technology before the outbreak of the coronavirus. Now, all the trends that were at play before the pandemic – the move to the cloud, managing remote work, and getting on top of compliance – have been accelerated,” Goldstuck says.
The research – the first Sage region to survey CFOs and other senior financial decision-makers about the impact of COVID-19 on their business operations – has also found that where businesses didn’t have some level of cloud-based financial management, this tended to go hand-in-hand with “a lack of overall strategic direction”.
However, the move to the cloud is not yet universal. The research found that 72% of large business respondents now operate in the cloud, using either hybrid or full cloud-based systems, with 77% using cloud-based solutions for financial management.
Power of the cloud
By using cloud-based financial management technologies, 82% of the respondents claim to have uncovered efficiencies and optimised operations, and use financial management technologies to automate and expedite compliance reporting. In addition, 83% maintain that cloud technologies have created more agile and cost-effective in-house finance functions.
Beyond the efficiencies derived by using cloud-based financial management solutions for basic financial functions, 86% of respondents reported that these technologies had helped their businesses to discover new opportunities and/or risks, with 72% saying they had also improved security and helped to protect financial data.
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