If you are a business on an on-premise solution of Infor M3, you will undoubtably be thinking about a move to Infor CloudSuite. This article gives a high-level overview of what to expect in the cloud.

This article covers what to expect in the cloud when you move from Infor M3on-premise to Infor CloudSuite from the following angles:

• System availability
• System updates
• Testing
• Security
• Data Recovery

If you would like more information about how these compare to on premise, contact us  and to learn about more differences between Infor M3 and Infor CloudSuite, check here.

System availability

Infor’s goal is to provide system availability 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, except during periods of scheduled maintenance, as defined in the customer’s subscription agreement. Infor’s service level objective for multi-tenant production environments is 99.7% availability (as defined in the customer’s subscription agreement) measured on a monthly basis.

System updates

In the cloud, customers receive automated product updates on a regular cadence. This schedule is designed to result in minimal disruption to operations, as customers no longer need to invest substantial resources in planning and completing the updates. Infor communicates to enrolled customers via a notification, when such updates are available. Customers can subscribe to notifications in the CloudSuite Self-Service Portal. The streamlined release process can be a significant benefit, as it allows customers to stay current on the latest version of a particular product with minimal manual effort.
Infor selects a date and time within the applicable product’s scheduled maintenance window to perform the update(s).

For new major updates that could introduce changes that impact the end users or business processes, products typically have the capability to toggle-on (i.e., activate a new feature). This allows users to preview the features for a limited time in a non-production tenant prior to activation in the production-tenant. Major updates generally occur, or are activated, twice a year.

In the cloud, there are typically no additional resource costs, as subscription services include deploying monthly updates and enhancements to the subscription services. Customers can see what is included in each update by subscribing to the monthly Knowledge Base (KB) articles available through Concierge.

Testing

Accepting and testing product updates

The testing of updates is first completed by the product development teams. This testing is followed by the execution of automated functional regression tests. The goal is to identify product-level defects before additional testing is performed in the cloud environment. Since Infor is responsible for the infrastructure, for multi-tenant customers Infor can test the update in a comparable environment.

Once functional, security and performance testing are completed, end-to-end integration testing is performed in the cloud environment where products are deployed and provisioned as suites. This testing covers the business process flows supported by the integrated products in each suite by industry. The goal is to identify any defects related to the integrations and business processes the integrations are designed to support.

Testing after product release

Infor conducts a number of tests prior to release, however, the customer retains testing responsibility for its operations. Infor uses Testing as a Service (TaaS) in an effort to create repeatable and efficient automated testing for Infor applications in the cloud environment. Customers may also subscribe to this service at an additional cost. The customer is expected to perform regression testing of interfaces and extensions for the products that are affected by updates.

Testing Considerations in the cloud:

• Customers should test application interfaces and extensions
• In the event a customer test related to the standard application functionality fails, the customer should log a support incident via Concierge to report the issue, where Infor Support can help triage and identify the appropriate resolution

Testing of Interfaces and exceptions

Customers remain responsible for testing their application interfaces and extensions. In the event a customer test fails, and the issue is related to the standard application functionality, customer should log a support incident via Concierge to report the issue. For customers who subscribe to Infor’s Testing as a Service (TaaS) offering, the overall testing time is designed to be reduced and easier with pre-defined automated scripts based on Implementation Accelerator (IA) business process flows. Regression testing is performed for business processes to validate they are functioning as designed and newly added changes integrate with the rest of the systems.

Security

Infor cloud offers a secured environment designed to help keep your organization’s data safe. The quick- and ever-changing security landscape can make it very difficult for an individual organization to keep up with every new or potential cyber threat. In Infor’s cloud, security is designed into the application from the ground up, and infrastructure and application security are managed by the service provider, that uses dedicated resources and systems to continually monitor the applicable systems for security breaches and threats, enabling a faster response to potential problems and identified risks.

• For data encryption, Infor encrypts the data in transit with TLS 1.2 (Industry Standard) and data at rest with AES 256. Please refer to https://trust.infor.com for overview of Infor’s commitment to security

For System and Organization Controls (SOC) report information, Infor provides customers access to applicable audit reports and bridge letters via the CloudSuite Self-Service Portal.

Disaster Recovery

In the event of a major disaster such as the ERP system crashing in the middle of the night, it’s important to understand the disaster recovery procedures and how they work.

With a SaaS solution, the responsibility for managing and maintaining the subscription software, including keeping applications upgraded to the most current release, and keeping infrastructure dynamic in scale, falls to the service provider – whose business model is structured around helping to ensure hardware and software resources are operational, up-to-date, and built to appropriate specifications for the applicable transaction levels. Infor designs its multi-tenant application infrastructure across multiple data centers in multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) Availability Zones (AZs) that are in geographically separate locations for fault tolerance and failover capabilities. Should a portion of a data center, an entire data center or an AZ suffer an outage, servers in the other server farms or data centers should remain available to continue to handle the load and auto-scale to provide additional capacity.

If you would like to receive more information about the difference between Infor M3 on-premise and in the multi-tenant cloud, let us know