The year has been one of successful change for Kruger, and in several respects at that. First, the company broadened its mission, starting to provide full representation services to other companies. By way of consequence, it also determined a need for a new mobile application its representatives could use in the field.

As its former application, a highly customized one, would have required many additions in this new context, a switch to a more standardized solution seemed an easier way of ensuring smooth operation, for example when importing a client company’s essential data. An additional benefit – indeed a fundamental one – proved to be the integrated, cutting-edge reporting and analysis capabilities found in the Companion® Suite, by CIS Group.

Why stop there? “Kruger decided to reap the full advantage of a cloud setup for the software solution – and the full security level of the private cloud model, with Microsoft Azure”, states Eric Tessier, Vice-president of Sales and Marketing at CIS. The trend cannot be clearer: at the time of writing, ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies trust the Microsoft Cloud.

Reliance on cloud services reduces the capital costs related to ownership of on-premise servers and infrastructures – and operating and maintenance costs as well. Budget planning is facilitated, with a monthly operating expense instead of those important infrastructure investments.

Companies choosing cloud services spare themselves the time and work otherwise required to ensure infrastructure maintenance, system security, and the evolution of services and technologies. In fact, that type of work will generally be done better and faster by the provider than if the client were to oversee it – especially a client whose core activity is not information technology.

In the same fashion with respect to the major issue of data security – and despite a widespread misconception, reliable cloud service providers are in a position to implement the best practices in terms of security and data confidentiality. Few smaller enterprises have the resources to establish security systems as strong as those of cloud providers.

Furthermore, the private cloud model chosen by Kruger offers the best protection in terms of security and confidentiality. In that model, as opposed to the public cloud, the service offered to one single client is hosted on servers and IT infrastructures that are exclusively dedicated to them.

Last but not least is the scalability advantage offered by cloud computing, as the service can be adapted remarkably fast to any increase in demand – which is exactly what Kruger anticipates as it strives to increase the number of its clients.
About Kruger

In 1904, Joseph Kruger, a New York City paper merchant, settled in Montréal and founded Kruger Paper Company Limited, later incorporated in 1921. When he died in 1927, his son Gene, who was just 25 at the time, took the helm of the business. Bernard, his younger brother, joined him later. During the second half of the XXth century, The Company successfully took up the challenge of making paper. The winning strategy involved acquiring mills and then fitting them out with state-of-the-art equipment to make them more efficient. Gene Kruger kept the company growing by acquiring other sites, not only in the same industry but also in new industry sectors: hydroelectricity, containerboard and packaging, tissue products, forest products, and recycling. The Company expanded into renewable energy projects in 2004, and into wines and spirits in 2006.