4 Critical Considerations When Selecting a Cloud Platform

Gary Feldman • September 8, 2022

As the trend towards cloud service continues, making certain you pick the right cloud platform(s) is a critical factor to long-term success. Cloud has become much more than outsourcing IT or software as a service. Use of the cloud has become an integral part of the way companies transact their business, design their processes and adapt to a changing marketplace.


So how do you select the right cloud platform for your company? A defined selection process that looks at the outcome from a business perspective using technology and partnerships as key considerations.


Define Business Outcomes


The answer always starts with your core business vision, mission and plan. Start with the Why! Some common reasons company’s choose cloud include:

  • The burning platform – Many companies are forced to move because their server operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft or their business management system was acquired and is being neglected.
  • Need to improve efficiency – Outdated “legacy” software restrict a business process to work the way the system does. For example, a distributor using older software is forced to pick pack and ship by the order as opposed to grouping orders by location or better yet routing pickers based upon picking efficiencies.
  • Cut costs – Many companies think moving to the cloud will cut costs. Cost evaluations are hard unless the direct cost savings are obvious. In small to mid-sized businesses the cost justification is often the reduction in IT personnel headcount. The true costs and benefits of the cloud can be hard to quantify without some pretty sophisticated analysis, but the savings are there to be had.
  • Cyber attack – Unfortunately the cost and risk of cyber attacks and cyber insurance are increasing. Several surveys estimate that 60% of small businesses are unable to survive six months following a cyber attack.
  • Improve business agility – Agility refers to the ability to adapt to changing economic or environmental circumstances. The COVID pandemic drove many companies to the cloud to support remote working. Although that phase of the pandemic is mostly behind us, a cloud platform should provide the flexibility to expand or contract, integrate and connect your business from anywhere to anywhere at any time.

These outcomes should be expanded into SMART goals. Specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound goals specific to your organization. The objective create the guiding principles for the SMART goals. The objectives and goals drive the selection process which becomes the How.


Define Cloud Strategy


As described in a LinkedIn Article regarding OnPremise vs. Cloud, we are all in the cloud and on-premise! Going cloud does not mean flipping a switch and poof our business is now digitally transformed. At I-BN we have identified three core cloud strategies:

  • Cloud Connected – Critical business systems remain on-premise but are connected to cloud services to optimize their efficiency and effectiveness of your on-premise or hosted technology solutions.
  • Hybrid – Re-platforming your critical business systems onto the best platform for your technology and business strategy. Hybrid cloud offers an incremental approach to digital transformation by incorporating the best of cloud with proven solutions
  • Cloud First – A cloud first strategy puts the cloud at the center of your business. Going cloud first requires selection of the right cloud platform for your business and redesigning your business processes to take advantage of that platform

There is no one size fits all solution to a cloud strategy. A number of different factors must be considered:

  • How core is technology to your business? A kitchen cabinet manufacturer may use sophisticated equipment for building their cabinets, however, technology is rarely their core competency. Alternatively, a high-tech company which develops software for computerized machinery often lives and breathes technology.
  • Is technology already disrupting your industry? You don’t have to be a taxi company to feel the disruptive impact of an Uber or Lyft. Many industries are feeling the Amazon or Wayfair effect from large online players eating into margins. Best Buy is a great example of a company that turned its brick-and-mortar stores into an advantage while embracing digital transformation.
  • How adaptable is your company to change? Just because you are interested in going cloud, doesn’t mean your company can turn on a dime. Small and mid-sized businesses are often thought of as nimble and easy to change when compared to huge corporations; however, this is not always the case!

Often companies take an incremental approach to digital transformation, moving from cloud connected to hybrid before embracing a cloud first strategy.


Evaluate Cloud Platforms


There are three general cloud platform types:

  1. Public Clouds are typically very large pools of IT infrastructure, partitioned and redistributed to multiple “tenants.” Most are sold based upon resource consumption with discounts for guaranteed minimums over longer terms. The most well-known public clouds include Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
  2. Private Clouds are resource pools which are dedicated to a single customer or group. Often managed private clouds are offered by niche service providers specializing in a type or specific of application or by an IT consultancy which builds clouds as a service. These are quite often described as Dedicated Clouds.
  3. Hybrid Clouds blend aspects of public and private clouds. Typically, a hybrid cloud will have some components shared amongst several private clouds. This can include the Windows Active Directory service or backup facilities.


There are no hard and fast rules for what type of cloud platform is best, but rather characteristics that can be described as benefits and constraints

The cloud platform should be selected to maximize the business benefit based upon the cloud strategy.  

  • Cloud Connected – When the core business systems are on-premise cloud connections could be provided by the publisher of those business systems or connected via integration platforms in the cloud or on premise. Many of the services being connected are served up by public clouds.  
  • Hybrid – When the core business system is in a Software as a Service (SaaS) application is in a proprietary cloud, other systems may be in the cloud or on premise.  
  • Cloud First strategy often results in a multiple - Cloud strategy with a central orchestrating cloud.


Cloud Integration Strategy


It is becoming increasingly rare to see all cloud services delivered from a single platform.


  • Mail is outsourced from a hosted Exchange server to Microsoft 365 or Gmail 
  • Tax services are offered by a cloud like Avalara rather than from within the software 
  • Payroll services outsourced from within the ERP to a specialized HR or PEO platform 
  • E-Commerce sites are hosted at a specialty hosting firm and not a web server managed by internal IT. 


How do you maintain a “single version of the truth” when data is outsourced in a multi-cloud world? Strategies include: 

  • Follow the ERP Lead – When a company uses a platform provided by the Software as a Service (Saas) application, like Sage Intacct, NetSuite or Salesforce, that platform typically offers their tools on their on proprietary platforms. Other core applications like SAP Business One, Acumatica and SageCRM offer a choice of publisher or partner platforms, but also provide “Certified” integration solutions. 
  • Integration Platforms – Often called Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) companies like Dell Boomi or BPA Platform are used as a common connector to one or more clouds or cloud services. These tools have built in connectors to platforms like Shopify, Magento, etc. in a store like fashion Microsoft Azure Logic Apps and SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP) also provide similar functionality optimized for their cloud platforms. 
  • Custom Development – There are a number of tools designed for Extraction Transformation and Loading (ETL) of data. Using an ETL tool you can connect anything and add logic in the middle to create custom solutions. An ETL tool can be housed on premise or in the cloud.  

iPaaS platform often can serve as custom ETL tools in the cloud, and typically have more built-in connectors and more limitations.


Conclusion


Every business has unique business processes, management styles, and competitive advantages. Similarly, each company should design their cloud operations to optimize their processes, compliment their management style and maximize their competitive advantages. Partnering with I-Business Network, you can leverage our 20+ years of experience turning the internet into a competitive advantage to optimize your cloud experience.

About the Author

As a former CPA, Accenture executive and now as a business owner and consultant, I-Business Network (I-BN) helps companies grow their business and create efficiency by increasing sales and streamlining business processes through technology.   Using process redesign and re-engineering techniques aligned to cloud and other technology, we help companies on their digital transformation journey.


A pioneer in the Cloud Services market, Gary Feldman formed I-BN in 1999 as an outsourced application hosting service focusing on mid-market ERP systems. Landed first hosting agreement with Sage Software (State of the Art), Advanced Software Development Company and SAP Americas (for SAP Business One) allowing I-BN to offer these products in the  Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Prior to forming I-BN, Mr. Feldman was a CPA for BDO Seidman and started the consulting practices for Eisner & Lubin, CPAs Miami office and Windham Brannon, CPA firms before joining Accenture.

You can contact Gary here:
gfeldman@i-bn.net

By Nicole Laurier May 11, 2026
Growing a business is hard enough. The answer rarely means buying more software. It means making what you already have work together. Most businesses are running a mix of systems that each do their job reasonably well in isolation. Accounting in one platform, customer data in another, orders coming in through a separate channel entirely. The problem isn’t the individual tools. It’s the gaps between them. And those gaps, filled daily by manual workarounds, duplicated data entry, and out-of-date reports, are quietly costing more than most business owners realize. When those gaps close, something shifts. The business doesn’t just run more smoothly. It becomes capable of things it couldn’t do before. What disconnected systems actually cost you The cost of poorly connected systems rarely shows up as a single line item. It shows up as the hour your finance team spends every morning manually transferring data between platforms. It shows up as the sales rep who quoted a price based on inventory that had already sold. It shows up as the leadership team making decisions from a report that was already out of date by the time it landed in their inbox. Individually, each of these problems feels manageable. Collectively, they represent a significant drag on the business. Time that should be going into growth goes into workarounds. Decisions that should be made confidently get delayed because nobody quite trusts the data. And as the business grows, the problem compounds rather than resolves itself. Integration as a growth strategy, not an IT project There’s a tendency to think of system integration as something the IT department handles quietly in the background. That framing is part of the reason so many businesses stay stuck with systems that don’t work together. Integration is a business decision. When your systems share data seamlessly, your team spends less time moving information around and more time acting on it. When a new order placed online automatically updates your inventory, triggers a fulfillment workflow, and posts to your accounts without anyone touching it, that’s not just efficiency. That’s a business that can scale without adding headcount to manage the seams between systems. BPA Platform makes this kind of integration possible without requiring a team of developers or a lengthy implementation project. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, it connects the systems your business already relies on and automates the workflows between them. The result is a business that runs more smoothly, responds more quickly, and is better positioned to grow. Connecting the systems you already have One of the most common concerns I hear from business owners is that integration sounds like it means replacing everything they’ve already invested in. It doesn’t. BPA Platform connects to the systems you already use, whether that’s Sage, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Shopify, or virtually any other platform your business runs on. That matters because most growing businesses have a mix of older, established systems and newer cloud-based applications. The platform that’s been running the business for a decade isn’t going anywhere, and it shouldn’t have to. BPA Platform works across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments, so you can build the connections your business needs without disrupting what’s already working. Security is built into the integration layer rather than bolted on afterward. Data moving between your systems is protected end to end, which matters particularly for businesses handling sensitive financial, customer, or operational information. What this looks like in practice Consider a business that sells through multiple channels. Orders come in online, through a sales team, and via wholesale partners. Each channel feeds into a different system. Without integration, someone is manually reconciling those orders, updating stock levels, and ensuring the accounts reflect what’s actually been sold. With BPA Platform in place, that entire process runs automatically. An order placed anywhere updates inventory everywhere, triggers the right fulfillment process, and posts to the accounts without a person in the middle. Or consider a leadership team that currently waits until month end to see how the business is performing. With automated reporting built on integrated data, that same team can have accurate, real-time visibility into the numbers that matter most, every day, without anyone spending time pulling the report together. These aren’t complex transformations. They’re the kind of straightforward improvements that free up your best people to focus on growth rather than administration. Growing without growing the complexity The businesses that scale most effectively are the ones that build operational foundations capable of supporting growth before they need them. Integration is one of those foundations. A business that has its systems working together is a business that can take on more customers, enter new markets, and move faster without the wheels coming off. BPA Platform is designed to scale with the business. Whether you’re connecting two systems today or building out a broader automation framework over time, the platform grows with your requirements rather than forcing you to start over when your needs change. If your systems are creating friction rather than enabling growth, it’s worth having an honest conversation about what that’s costing you and what a more connected business could look like. That’s exactly the kind of conversation we enjoy having at Fisher Technology. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Fisher Technology helps businesses across North America connect their systems and automate their workflows using BPA Platform. If you’d like to explore what better integration could mean for your business, we’d love to talk. Get in touch: www.fisher-technology.com/contact
Finance, credit control, automation
By Nicole Laurier April 21, 2026
Finance teams are often described as the engine room of a business. They keep the numbers accurate, the cash flowing, and the reporting on time. But in many organizations, a significant portion of that team’s energy goes into tasks that are repetitive, manual, and frankly not a great use of skilled people. That’s where business process automation comes in. And when it’s applied thoughtfully to finance, the results go well beyond efficiency gains. Done right, automation repositions a finance team from a cost center into something that actively contributes to business growth. The Problem With Manual Finance Processes Most finance teams are sitting on processes that haven’t changed much in years. Reports get generated by hand. Invoices are chased through spreadsheets and email threads. Credit control relies on someone remembering to follow up. Reconciliation happens in a mad scramble at month end. These tasks are necessary, but they don’t need to be manual. And when they are, the cost isn’t just time. Errors creep in. Deadlines get missed. Cash flow suffers. And the finance professionals who should be providing strategic insight spend their days on administration instead. “When skilled finance people spend their days on administration, the business loses the strategic thinking it’s paying for.” What Automation Actually Looks Like In Practice BPA Platform addresses this by automating the repetitive, rule-based work that clogs up finance workflows. That includes the automatic generation and distribution of invoices and statements, automated credit control procedures that send the right communication to the right customer at the right time, purchase order approval workflows that route requests based on value thresholds, and scheduled financial reporting that lands in the right inbox without anyone having to build it. The platform integrates with the accounting and ERP systems finance teams already use, including Sage, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others, so there’s no need to rip out existing infrastructure. Automation gets layered on top of what’s already working. A Real Example: What This Looks Like For A Finance Team One pattern that comes up consistently across BPA Platform customers is the reporting burden. Finance and operations teams often spend several hours every week manually building, formatting, and distributing reports that nobody has time to question or redesign because they’ve always been done that way. With BPA Platform’s reporting automation in place, those reports are generated and distributed automatically in real time. The staff time that was going into assembly gets freed up for analysis. Errors that crept in through manual data handling disappear. And the people responsible for financial reporting can focus on what the numbers mean rather than how to produce them. Codeless Platforms’ customers across industries have seen this play out in reporting, reconciliation, and financial administration. The time savings are consistent, and so is the observation that the real benefit isn’t just the hours recovered. It’s what the team does with them. Credit Control: Where Automation Directly Protects Cash Flow One of the highest-impact areas for finance automation is credit control. Late payments are one of the most common causes of cash flow pressure for businesses of all sizes, and most of the time, the problem isn’t that customers won’t pay. It’s that nobody followed up in a consistent, timely way. BPA Platform can monitor outstanding invoices daily, automatically generating and sending the right communication based on how overdue an account is. An approaching due date triggers a polite reminder. A missed payment triggers a follow-up. An aged debt triggers an alert to the collections team and the relevant account manager simultaneously. The whole process runs without anyone having to track it manually, and nothing falls through the cracks. For businesses that have implemented this kind of automated credit control, the results tend to show up quickly. Aged debtor times come down. Cash flow becomes more predictable. And the finance team spends less time chasing and more time managing. For businesses that have implemented this kind of automated credit control, the results tend to show up quickly. Aged debtor times come down. Cash flow becomes more predictable. And the finance team spends less time chasing and more time managing. The B roader Shift: From Reactive To Strategic The real value of finance automation isn’t just the hours saved, though those matter. It’s what becomes possible when the team has capacity to think rather than just process. Real-time visibility into cash flow. Faster month-end close. Earlier identification of risk. More informed conversations with leadership about where the business stands and where it’s heading. Finance teams that automate the routine work don’t just get more efficient. They get more valuable to the business. And that’s the transformation worth aiming for. “Finance teams that automate the routine work don’t just get more efficient. They get more valuable to the business.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fisher Technology helps organizations across North America implement BPA Platform to streamline finance operations and unlock the full potential of their teams. If you’d like to explore what automation could look like for your finance function, we’d love to talk. Get in touch: www.fisher-technology.com/contact
By Nicole Laurier April 9, 2026
Sit through enough software demos and a pattern starts to emerge. Somewhere between the slide on streamlined workflows and the one about real-time visibility, the presenter leans forward and drops the phrase: AI-powered. The room nods. Someone scribbles it down. And the question nobody says out loud is "what does that actually mean?" To be fair, AI is genuinely changing enterprise software. Real progress is happening in how systems learn from data, flag problems early, and cut down on manual grunt work. This isn’t an argument that AI is all smoke and no fire. It’s an argument that not all AI is the same thing, and that mid-market buyers are getting a raw deal when it comes to telling the difference. The Pressure to Lead with AI Mid-market ERP and CRM vendors are caught in a tough spot. Enterprise players have poured billions into AI, and their customers are asking the same questions regardless of company size. So “AI-powered” has quietly shifted from being a technical description to a marketing checkbox, something that needs to show up on the website, in the pitch deck, and in the renewal conversation, whether the product genuinely justifies it or not. This isn’t a dig at any one vendor. It’s the water the whole industry is swimming in right now. When buyers expect AI and competitors are claiming it, stretching the definition becomes hard to resist. The result is a market where “AI-powered” can mean anything from a genuinely sophisticated machine learning model to a rebranded reporting dashboard. Both might be useful. But they’re not the same thing, and they shouldn’t carry the same price tag. What “AI-Powered” Often Looks Like in Practice A few patterns come up again and again: Predictions that are really just history repeating. If a system flags a customer as “at risk” because their order frequency dropped, that’s not a prediction, that’s a report. Useful, sure, but it’s been available for years. Platforms like BPA Platform have delivered exactly this kind of data-driven alerting and exception reporting through straightforward business rules and workflow logic, long before anyone was calling it AI. The capability was always real. The rebrand is what’s new. Automation dressed up as intelligence . Routing an invoice to the right approver based on a spend threshold. Triggering a follow-up when an order status changes. Escalating a support case that’s been sitting too long. These are rules-based processes and BPA Platform handles them through its low code automation engine without needing a machine learning model anywhere near them. They’re reliable, auditable, and they work. When vendors slap an AI label on this kind of automation, it doesn’t make the feature more powerful. It just makes the buying conversation murkier. Generative AI bolted on rather than built in . The scramble to add large language model features to existing products has produced some genuinely useful results and some that are basically a chat window glued onto software that hasn’t fundamentally changed underneath. The question worth asking isn’t whether there’s a generative component. It’s whether it’s working from relevant data, wired into actual workflows, and backed by someone who’ll own the problem when it gets something wrong. A Simple Framework for Evaluating AI Claims A Simple Framework for Evaluating AI Claims You don’t need a data science background to push back on what vendors are telling you. A handful of direct questions will do most of the work: Whose data is it learning from? Ours, or a generic model? A system trained on your business behaves very differently from one drawing on industry-wide averages. What happens when it gets it wrong? Every AI system makes mistakes. How a vendor answers this question says a lot about how seriously they’ve thought it through. Who owns it when something breaks or changes? Features tied to third-party models can shift behavior when those models are updated. That’s a support question, not a technical footnote. Can we see it running in a live environment? Demo environments are controlled by design. Asking to speak with a reference customer who uses the feature in production is a completely fair request, and the answer tells you a lot! So So What Should You Actually Do? None of this is a case for tuning out AI conversations entirely. Informed skepticism is different from blanket cynicism. AI is developing fast, and what isn’t quite there yet could look very different in two or three years. The vendors worth watching are the ones building seriously on solid data foundations — and being straight with customers about what’s ready and what isn’t. The ones worth being cautious about are using AI language mainly to justify price rises, paper over product gaps, or match a competitor’s latest press release. Your business deserves sharper questions than that. Ask them. The vendors with real answers won’t mind. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Full disclosure: this blog was written with the help of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. Yes, we’re aware of the irony — a post about not blindly trusting AI was drafted with the help of AI. But that’s rather the point. Used thoughtfully, with a human steering the ideas, challenging the output, and rewriting the bits that sounded like a robot trying to sound like a person, AI can be a genuinely useful tool. It didn’t write this. It helped write this. There’s a difference — and that difference is exactly what this blog is about. What “AI-Powered” Often Looks Like in Practice