Managed ERP hosting: focus on your business, not your servers

Your ERP carries invoicing, stock, accounting and sometimes payroll. As long as it runs, nobody thinks about it. But behind every uneventful day there are servers to maintain, patches to apply, backups to check and alerts to watch, nights included.

This article walks through that invisible work, explains what managed hosting covers and gives you the questions to ask when comparing offers.

What an ERP in production demands

Installing an ERP is a project. Running it is a job, made of repetitive tasks that don't forgive a lapse:

• Security patches for the operating system, the database and the dependencies, applied without breaking your customizations.
• Backups, to schedule, to monitor and above all to test: a backup that has never been restored is only a hypothesis.
• Monitoring of performance, disk space, certificates and scheduled jobs, with someone to react when an alert fires on a Sunday.
• Security: remote access, firewalls, network segmentation, encrypted traffic.
• Capacity: anticipating the growth of data and users before slowdowns set in.
• Incidents: diagnosing, restoring service, then understanding what happened so it doesn't happen again.

One by one, each task looks simple. Together, they often fall on a person who already has another job. The risk isn't the routine: it's the day it gets skipped, because that person is on leave or busy with an emergency.

What managed hosting covers

With managed hosting, a provider takes charge of your ERP's infrastructure and its day-to-day operation. You keep using your software and you keep ownership of your data; the provider handles the rest.

It differs from three neighboring offers:

• On-demand infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) provides building blocks: servers, storage, network. It is powerful, but assembling, securing and running them is up to you.
• The vendor's SaaS edition is ready to use, but often more standardized: some customizations or third-party modules don't fit.
• The integrator configures the ERP and makes it evolve functionally. Running infrastructure is usually not their core business.

Managed hosting sits between the three: your ERP, with its customizations, on infrastructure run by a team whose job it is.

Managed, public cloud or in-house: an honest comparison

No option is right for everyone. To compare, ask each one the same questions:

• Who applies patches and tests backups? In-house and on a public cloud, your team does. With managed hosting, the provider does, and the contract should say so.
• Who watches at night and on weekends? An in-house on-call rota is expensive and rests on few people.
• How does the bill change? Public clouds bill by usage, so the budget varies from month to month. A fixed monthly fee can be planned.
• How many contacts when something breaks? One party responsible end to end avoids the back-and-forth between host, integrator and vendor.

An in-house server still makes sense if you have a strong, available operations team, or very specific constraints. Otherwise, time spent maintaining infrastructure is rarely the best use of your people.

Questions to ask before choosing a provider

Before signing, ask for precise answers, ideally in writing:

1. Are the resources dedicated to your ERP or shared with other customers? Reserved resources give stable performance.
2. Who applies patches, how often, and in which maintenance window?
3. How are backups made, where are they kept, and when was a restore last tested?
4. Is there a disaster recovery plan? Is it included or sold as an option?
5. Who watches your environment at night, and who tells you when there's an incident?
6. Do your customizations, connectors, add-ons and reporting tools move as they are? Or will they need to be rebuilt?
7. How do you get your data back if you leave? Reversibility should be in the contract, with a complete export.
8. Is the price fixed, or does it depend on usage?
9. Where is your data hosted, and who can access it?

A serious provider answers each one plainly. Be wary of impressive figures with no contract to back them.

How we work at BigBang Cloud

BigBang Cloud hosts and runs ERP, CRM and BI systems on a private cloud. In practice:

• A private environment for your ERP, with dedicated, reserved resources.
• Servers and patches are on us: operating system, database and dependencies.
• Automated backup plans, replication and a managed disaster recovery plan, included in the service.
• 24/7 monitoring and continuous performance tuning.
• Multi-layer security: ZTNA, WAF, VPN, network segmentation and SSL encryption.
• Like-for-like migration: customizations, connectors and APIs, add-ons, reporting and EDI tools move with your ERP, with no redesign of your processes.
• Full, contractual reversibility: your data belongs to you, and you can get a complete, exportable backup of your database at any time.
• A fixed monthly fee, with no usage-based billing, and one point of contact, responsible end to end.

Onboarding follows four steps: an audit of your ERP and the applications connected to it, the migration, the go-live, then day-to-day operations. We host 17 systems today, including Odoo, SAP, Sage X3, Oracle NetSuite and Salesforce. If yours isn't among them, tell us: we evaluate new systems regularly.

In short

An ERP in production needs constant attention, made of small tasks that must never be forgotten. Managed hosting hands that work to a team whose job it is, so yours can focus on its own. To choose well, look less at promises than at written answers: who does what, when, and what the contract says.

Want to know how we would host your ERP? Write to us: we always start with an audit.