Today, many of the online services we use operate through the cloud. What was once a mysterious, abstract concept has slowly become part of our everyday lives. Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft 365, and Google Drive are just a few examples of popular cloud models that consumers use on a daily basis.

Organisations, too, are increasingly shifting their operations to the cloud. The last few years have seen modern businesses migrate to this model en masse to reinvent how they deliver their products and services and undertake business in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Cloud computing brings increased flexibility, functionality, and security – all without the high cost of hardware. COVID-19 reinforced the importance of the cloud as organisations quickly pivoted to remote set-ups and the ability to access data anywhere, anytime became critical to business survival. During the pandemic, ‘Zoom’ entered the daily lexicon of many workers across the globe, becoming a lifeline for distributed workforces.

Not only are cloud services allowing us to work in more dynamic ways than ever before, they’re also changing business models and enabling smaller players to disrupt markets with greater ease than was previously possible.

HR at a glance

One area that greatly benefits from transitioning to the cloud is HR. The HR department deals with vast amounts of employee and financial data – all of which must be accurate, secure, and compliant. Just as organisations use data to be agile and thrive from a customer perspective, data can also be used to gain valuable people insights – to attract, recruit and develop talent – and to meet people-related compliance obligations.

HR’s workload is often laden with time consuming, manual, and document-heavy processes. The need to access data from anywhere, at any time, is crucial. HR’s handling of sensitive employee records makes security in this department critical.

As the pandemic demonstrated, future-proofing business operations is critical in a VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, complex, ambiguous) world. However, with all HR data stored and backed up in the cloud, the risk of failure and data loss due to a natural disaster, power failure or other crisis is mitigated. Having all data hosted in the cloud will allow organisations to conduct business as usual and minimise any downtime and loss of productivity.

In this white paper, ELMO outlines the benefits of moving to the cloud – with a particular focus on cloud-based HR platforms, and how this can help streamline time consuming processes and enable HR to get back to what really matters: creating an unforgettable employee experience.

For further information, download the full white paper here.