Scaling Innovation and Security with Infor SunSystems Cloud

The demands on modern Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are constantly evolving, pushing them to seek resilient, innovative, and efficient solutions. While costs remain not only the CFO but also the entire Finance team’s daily headache, lagging software and tedious, manual processes should not be in their way, adding more oil to the fire.

The cloud provides CFOs with a gateway to innovations and cost savings, but more importantly, it also provides enhanced collaboration, security, compliance, and more. Amidst today’s highly unpredictable market conditions, having a reliable financial management solution is no longer a nice-to-have afterthought.

In a recent webinar, Rita Mistry, Infor’s Director of Industry & Solution Strategy Dept., shared some interesting statistics, “Since we launched in 2022, SunSystem Cloud has now been deployed in over 50 countries, and that number is growing on a monthly basis. Historically, though, we’ve pretty much installed SunSystems around the world since 1981. If we look at the split of our customers, 33% of our customers are within the APAC region, and the majority of our customers, 54%, are within EMEA. And we do see a trend of about half of our customers transitioning from on-premise to the cloud, and the other half being net new customers who join us and have never used us before.”

Why are CFOs moving to the cloud?

Continuous innovation

One of the most compelling reasons driving the move away from legacy software is the pursuit of continuous innovation. In the current fast-paced business environment, innovation is not a luxury but a necessity for competitive advantage.

Maintaining a traditional on-premise infrastructure presents significant and persistent challenges. This model places heavy burdens on internal IT departments, consuming their resources with routine maintenance, security patching, and hardware management. This operational overhead in turn leads to hindered support for strategic initiatives, diverting IT focus from value-generating projects like advanced analytics or digital transformation.

Nevertheless, many businesses today still rely on these legacy on-premise platforms for critical missions like financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, or compliance. The result? Businesses miss out on modern, emerging technologies. Imagine leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive forecasting, big data analytics for deep market insights, advanced document management systems for compliance, or intelligent automated workflows for efficiency. These technologies can potentially be part of the company’s essential financial toolkits for modern CFOs.

Furthermore, planning, testing, and deploying these cutting-edge technologies on premise is both complex and inherently risky. And let’s also not forget the challenges of integrating disparate software.

In contrast, cloud-based financial management solutions, such as Infor SunSystems Cloud, offer a strategic and low-risk platform for innovation. This platform is fundamentally designed to embrace the future, primarily due to its dynamic scalability and extensibility.

The cloud model effortlessly handles variable usage and peak loads. For instance, during month-end closes or annual budgeting cycles, computing resources can be increased on demand, all without disrupting core operations. This elasticity ensures peak performance when it is needed most.

One of the cloud’s key advantages is continuous product enhancements, delivered directly by the software vendors. This means the financial platform stays updated with the latest technology, security patch, and compliance. On top of that, these updates are often carried out behind the scenes with minimal or no expensive traditional upgrade disruptions (like lengthy downtime or custom code rework) that plague on-premise systems.

Cost efficiency

On-premise solutions typically require a substantial, continuous investment in IT resources. This includes the draining tasks of constant system upgrades, maintenance, patching, and the management of physical hardware and supporting software licences. Cloud-based systems eliminate the high upfront and ongoing infrastructure costs, enabling businesses to shift from an CAPEX-intensive model into OPEX.

Infor SunSystems Cloud delivers a significantly higher ROI by eliminating the need for this dual investment in both hardware and software infrastructure. They also offer built-in redundancy, automatic updates, and world-class security measures as part of the subscription, removing these complex and expensive responsibilities from the client.

As a result of these factors, Infor SunSystems Cloud provides a more predictable cost of ownership option compared to other deployment methods, ensuring maximum value and financial viability for the organisation.

Collaboration

Cloud solutions can facilitate real-time collaboration, which then acts as the catalyst for innovation. By breaking down traditional data silos and communication barriers, cloud environments allow teams, regardless of their geographical location, to access the same up-to-the-minute information simultaneously. This continuous, shared view of data, particularly critical in financial analysis and reporting, ensures that decisions are based on the latest insights.

Infor SunSystems Cloud simplifies collaboration with a consumer-friendly interface, mobile access, real time alerts, and customisable workflows. These features enhance employee productivity, speed up manual processes, and promote collaboration within teams.

Security

Being able to keep up with continuous changes in software security and regulations is both challenging and costly for any business. As cyber threats continue to evolve, IT teams will struggle to stay ahead and protect their organisations.

While the theoretical benefits of the cloud are compelling, real-world application requires a solution with a proven pedigree. Having served diverse industries globally for over 40 years, Infor SunSystems has evolved into a cloud-native powerhouse designed to simplify the most complex financial processes.

Infor SunSystems Cloud is specifically engineered to simplify and address these critical pain points. One of the most significant values of the cloud solution is its automatic pushing of all software and security updates, ensuring that every user across the organisation consistently operates on the latest version and tools and is always complying with all relevant regulations. This proactive approach dramatically reduces the risk of non-compliance and security vulnerabilities often introduced by delayed or missed updates.

The foundation of Infor SunSystems Cloud’s reliability is its secure and fully managed hosting environment. This environment is strategically hosted within Amazon Web Services (AWS), a global leader in secure cloud infrastructure. Crucially, the responsibility for managing both the underlying infrastructure and the application security rests in Infor.

This arrangement provides multiple layers of benefits:

High-grade security: Leveraging AWS’s rigorous global security standards, the environment benefits from state-of-the-art physical and network protection.

Expert management: Infor’s dedicated security and infrastructure teams possess deep expertise in managing the SunSystems application itself, offering specialised protection that a general IT team might not be able to match.

Reduced customer overhead: Customers are freed from the capital expenditure and operational costs associated with maintaining servers, network hardware, and specialised security personnel.

Transitioning to Infor SunSystems Cloud is about adopting an ecosystem that grows with your business. To see how this global solution helps drive real financial impacts, let’s take a deeper dive into the core architecture of Infor SunSystems Cloud.

Infor SunSystems Cloud: A Deeper Dive

Infor SunSystems Cloud is a fully integrated suite of financial and business management applications, designed for organisations with complex operations and fast-growing demands. Being developed 40+ years ago, serving various industries globally, Infor SunSystems has been trusted by over 6,000 in 190 countries.

Today, Infor SunSystems and its latest cloud-based iteration continue to stay true to their origin of being a strong solution that simplifies financial processes.

In Infor SunSystems Cloud, there are 3 core pillars.

3 core pillars of Infor SunSystems Cloud

Record-to-Report

Infor SunSystems Cloud uses a single ledger for all accounting data (the general ledger, sales, purchases, receivables, and payables). This single ledger makes it easier to access detailed information and report on all transactions efficiently. As all transactions are posted to the same data set at the same time, users never need to perform separate reconciliation.

The Record-to-Report core pillar represents SunSystems’ capability to record all ledgers and process journals from an accrual’s prepayment perspective for reports (e.g., management reports, statutory reports, or any other reports as required).

This pillar provides users with:

User-definable multi-dimensional analysis to meet the business’ reporting needs today as well as in the future

5 currency dimensions per transaction for multiple country jurisdiction requirements (originating transaction currency, base currency, second base or reporting currency, and additional variable currencies)

Dynamic drill-down capabilities right on financial reports to further explore details, such as balances by period, cost centre, project and transactions

Automated alerts and workflows to enhance collaboration and financial management

Real-time notifications about critical events such as the posting of a transaction over a particular amount to a sensitive balance sheet account

Automatic synchronisation of static data, such as accounts, analysis codes, journal types and currency codes across business units

Infor SunSystems Cloud's user definable ledger analysis

Image: Infor SunSystems Cloud’s user-definable analysis fields, allowing for much greater reporting and analysis

Procure-to-Pay

This pillar further enhances the Record-to-Report capabilities, providing organisations with an end-to-end process for raising a requisition, turning it into a purchase order receipt, invoice matching, and making payments. This translates to faster processing times, cost savings, and improved control over your spending.

With Procure-to-Pay, users will get dedicated capabilities to:

Manage suppliers and streamline purchasing processes

Formalise purchasing to leverage three-way matching, maintain accurate inventory levels, enhance financial control and ensure accountability

Submit purchase request for approval, create a soft commitment, source goods/services and check against available budget

Submit purchase order for approval, automatically email purchase order to supplier with automated document storage for simple retrieval from supplier records

Register an invoice to complete a two/three-way match or register a stand-alone invoice, store invoice documents and submit for approval

Optimise processes with automated approval workflows for supplier onboarding and bank detail management

Improve payment processing with automated document storage and email delivery of remittance advices

Order-to-Cash

An inefficient Order-to-Cash process could be restricting your company’s growth by causing poor cash flow. As a crucial sequence in a business’s sales cycle, Infor SunSystems Cloud’s Order-to-Cash provides the ability to raise orders and generate invoices to customers automatically, monitor revenue, identify deferred revenue, record payments, and manage age debts as they arise.

This pillar provides users with:

A dedicated customer management platform for streamlined sales order and invoice processing

Tools to create a one-off sales order or a contract for invoicing across multiple billing periods

Automation for repetitive tasks like data entry, deferred revenue postings, invoice creation, or email sales orders to customers

And surrounding these core 3 pillars is Infor’s technology wrapper, Infor OS.

Infor Operating Service (OS) is Infor’s cloud-based technology platform that acts as the backbone for many of Infor’s industry-specific solutions, including Infor SunSystems Cloud. This next-gen operating platform brings together critical business functionalities, AI-driven intelligence, and integration capabilities to both Infor and non-Infor (third-party) ecosystems.

Sitting at the heart of the entire system is the document management capability, allowing all users to record, store, manage, and retrieve documents centrally or directly from within SunSystems without the need to waste valuable time digging through countless files and folders across different repositories.

Watch our on-demand webinar: Unlocking the Power of Infor OS: The Next Level for SunSystems

The bigger question is, is Infor SunSystems Cloud the right fit for your finance function?

Infor SunSystems Cloud is a flexible solution that scales with your business. Don’t take our words for it! See SunSystems in action but scheduling a quick call with our expert today!