HR is still in the early days of cloud adoption. HR cloud services take advantage of the software applications, designed to provide self-service tools for businesses to achieve their targeted goals with a preset timeline.

While many of the HR functions, wherein no sensitive data is involved is slowly making shift towards the cloud, organisations are still in the process of reconsidering investments on the data transfer to cloud. Also harnessing the power of big data on cloud is another major challenge, which will be addressed in a separate chapter.

HR cloud services come with enhanced capabilities to provide high-quality HR apps that include timekeeping, benefits administration, travel and expenditure reporting, goal setting and basic calculation of incentives are among the offerings on cloud. However, one key question besides the challenges to moving to cloud, is have organisations increased their business spending to equip efficiencies?

According to a recent survey conducted by ZDNet and TechRepublic, it found that, “More than one-third of firms’ top business objective for moving to a private cloud is to take advantage of the resilience and business continuity of the cloud provider.”

Of the organisations surveyed, “22 percent said they have only been using infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service technologies for about the last six months. A further 35 percent said they have been working with this type of cloud service for more than two years.”

See: Cloud-Based HR System: Revolutionizing the way recruitment works

Foreseeing tomorrow

As the cloud gets more sophisticated to meet the increasing industry demands and preferences of HR professionals, some of the most predictive happenings that ZDNet and TechRepublic survey could foresee with the changing HR tech trends are:

• Businesses will continue to place more trust and emphasis to shift and choose private cloud over the public one.
• Soon workforces will be empowered to trust cloud data and accept it with complete trust on the authenticity of information available on cloud. Employees will further start using cloud-driven services increasingly and choose workplace-data interaction with fellow co-workers on cloud.
• While some HR functions will continue to be a part of private cloud, there is scope for a vast amount of critical data to be made available at a public cloud level, where appropriate.
• As you see the cloud is getting richer to embed elements such as employee gamification to make parts of goals and incentives provided to staffers more accepted.

Gathering insights from a recent study by Oxford Economics and SAP on cloud computing adoption titled, ‘The Cloud Grows Up’ reveals, “67 percent businesses will see the cloud changing skill sets and transforming the role of HR. 58 percent of enterprises predict their use of cloud computing will increase top-line revenue growth in three years. 44 percent of enterprises are relying on cloud computing to launch new business models today, predicting this will increase to 55 percent in three years.”

With cloud platform and applications becoming more scalable and reliable, the once-elusive business goals will now be attainable for HR professionals. HR cloud services will undoubtedly form an integral part of the future workplaces.

Also read: More global companies choose Workday to migrate HR to the cloud

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