Hosting Sage 100 Contractor in the cloud allows you to unlock new levels of operational flexibility and value for your construction firm, while ditching the limits of on-premise deployments. Migrating your legacy system to a private, secure environment lets you enjoy many of the benefits of web-based technology while maintaining control over your data and the stability of continuing to rely on the application that powers your financial management. If your firm is not ready to switch to a SaaS construction accounting software such as Sage Intacct, then working with a CSP (cloud service provider) is the right move to ensure your business gets the most out of your technology investment.
Here are the top reasons why you should host Sage 100 Contractor in the cloud:
Top Benefits of Cloud Hosting for Sage 100 Contractor
Sage 100 Contractor already includes robust construction-specific features like project accounting, job costing, change order management, certified payroll reporting and more. Cloud hosting helps you amplify these capabilities further by removing barriers that traditionally limit your operations, drive up costs and restrict your ability to scale. Here are the additional benefits you gain when you migrate:
Elimination of Hardware Dependencies
Traditional on-premise deployments require you to maintain servers, other physical equipment, and handle system updates in-house, putting the burden on your IT team and taking them away from other critical tasks. Cloud hosting allows you to transfer these responsibilities to your service provider, who will load your Sage 100 Contractor software from their own data center. This offloads both maintenance and the need to keep hardware in your office or field locations, with your CSP taking care of updating and troubleshooting on their end.
Mobile Optimization
Legacy on-premise systems are rarely equipped to be used easily on mobile devices, many having been designed before smartphones became ubiquitous. However, a cloud hosting provider will help you optimize your Sage 100 Contractor installation to allow your team to be able to access your construction accounting software via remote connection and a mobile interface. Project managers can update progress billing information, approve change orders, and access job cost reports using tablets or smartphones without technical barriers.
Multi-Location Access
You cannot take your office with you when traveling to onsite projects, but working with on-premise software forces you to work around this limitation in ways that are rarely efficient, and sometimes costly. Coordinating with different teams, subcontractors, client representatives and other parties effectively requires making communication as seamless as possible, which also includes being able to access and share data with as few hiccups as possible. Hosting your construction accounting in the cloud helps you achieve this, letting authorized users connect to your system from anywhere with an Internet signal.
More Reliable Reporting
Too many construction firms still track project information in Excel because their on-premise ERP systems lack real-time accessibility from remote locations, i.e., job sites. Sage 100 Contractor provides comprehensive industry-specific reporting functionality, but only when your teams can actually access it when needed. Cloud hosting ensures that the features you need remain available to your team at all times, eliminating the need for tedious manual tracking in spreadsheet hard copies that have to be uploaded at different times.
Scalable Resource Management
Hosting Sage 100 Contractor in the cloud offers you the flexibility to scale computing resources based on your current IT needs, and without investing in adding new physical hardware. With on-premise systems, you only have as much performance as you have the equipment to handle your processing power needs, meaning you have to keep buying servers to pump out more bandwidth. However, cloud-based environments allow you to increase or decrease usage on-demand from the data center where your software lives.
Simplified Integration
If you operate like most modern construction firms, you also rely on additional software for estimating, project management, document control, etc. and have to ensure all of these applications exchange data with one another. Cloud hosting gives you the opportunity to simplify the integration process and ensure reliable connectivity between Sage 100 Contractor and your connected systems when you work with a service provider that understands the architecture.
Improved Data Security and Disaster Recovery
Cybersecurity in cloud-based environments is often easier to enforce than for on-premise deployments that have remote desktop connections, particularly when attempting to integrate other endpoints that are already cloud-connected. Legacy applications were not built to handle modern security needs, so even something as innocuous as accessing the system with your smartphone can leave huge gaps open if not configured properly. Additionally, working the cloud allows for data to be backed up more frequently without forcing system downtime and disrupting your team’s productivity, and ensuring that you are able to restore your operations quickly without losing critical files.
How to Host Sage 100 Contractor in the Cloud
Hosting Sage 100 Contractor will already inevitably provide you with benefits, but how you host your construction accounting software can also have an impact on your ROI, depending on your business needs:
Private Cloud Hosting
A “private cloud” is used to denote an environment is hosted individually and not shared in a shared space, or what is typically referred to as a “public cloud.” The former ensures that your application lives in a dedicated server tailored to your needs and partitioned for the resources you need, and is typically what a third-party service provider will offer.
Sage Partner Cloud
The Sage Partner Cloud (SPC) is Sage’s own ecosystem for hosting software such as Sage 300, Sage 100 and Sage 100 Contractor. Customers have a choice between an Azure or AWS environment in Sage’s data center. You are also able to work with a certified Strategic Hosting Provider to handle your application in their own private cloud-hosted environment through SPC as well.
Hybrid Cloud
A “hybrid cloud” designates any setup that uses any significant mixture of on-premise and hosted resources. This approach gives you the flexibility to retain existing physical hardware while leveraging cloud-based servers to handle certain portions of your environment.
NOTE: Sage 100 Contractor vs Sage 100
There is significant confusion online over similar past naming conventions for different versions of the Sage 100 business management system and for Sage 100 Contractor. The subscription version of the former launched under the name “Sage 100c,” which may appear similar to the latter, before it was later changed to “Sage 100cloud” to make its purpose of enabling cloud-connectivity clearer. The most important thing to understand is that both solutions have different industry functions, but hosting either in the cloud still provides many of the same benefits.
SWK Technologies: Combining Sage Expertise with Secure Cloud Hosting
SWK Technologies brings decades of experience as an award-winning Sage software reseller together with a Sage-certified hosting service to provide you with expert guidance for migrating your Sage 100 Contractor application to the cloud successfully. Get in touch with our expert consultants today and see for yourself how we can ensure you get the best value return on your technology investment.
Contact SWK here to discover how our Secure Cloud Hosting service will solve your construction firm’s most persistent operational challenges while maximizing your ROI for Sage 100 Contractor.