The transition from an on–premise ERP architecture to the cloud can necessitate substantial change in an organization. Because some confusion still sometimes exists on the subject, some companies may need assistance and support in developing an internal migration plan.
No matter your question or concern, we are here to help and support you throughout the journey to the Cloud.
General
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.
After contract signatures, the first step in a customer’s cloud journey is the provisioning of the applicable environments.
The subscription services typically include the provisioning of three environments (one production and two non-production) for multi-tenant subscriptions.
Infor’s cloud solutions are generally deployed and delivered as multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS) solutions, which means the process of provisioning infrastructure and subscription software is completed by Infor.
Implementing typically begins with establishing access (setting up key administrative user accounts) and preparing for initial data migration/loading.
Infor uses a multi-tiered model to help monitor, identify, analyze, and act upon issues with the subscription services. The tiered monitoring includes, but is not limited to: infrastructure, operating system, application, user interface, and performance.
The customer is responsible for its network and internet access performance and ensuring devices meet the appropriate specifications and bandwidth requirements to run Infor subscription software.
Your data
In the cloud, the customer owns the customer data in the subscription environment, and Infor is responsible for the subscription services.
Infor does not independently add users to the system for its own use or have access to alter customer data in the cloud. Infor has strict data security standards and policies in place designed to help protect customer data.
In a SaaS solution, Infor manages the periodic backup and redundancy of customer data within the subscription environment. All Infor-initiated subscription service backups are exclusively to support data recovery in the event of data loss.
If a customer has other organizational needs for a backup, he may request a copy of a data backup up to two times per twelve-month period.
In a quick and simple way, multi-tenant customers can request data refreshes from production to non-production environments.
Data refreshes from non-production to production multi-tenant environments are allowed when the customer is in the implementation phase. Ad-hoc data refreshes from production to non-production environments can also be scheduled by the customer at a maximum frequency of one data refresh every quarter, in an effort to limit the load refreshes can place on the system.
In the cloud, customers can still access the same type of data, but in a different controlled way. Each applicable Infor application which is designed to help customers access data has built-in querying and reporting capabilities and certain additional capabilities of the analytics platform. The applicable Infor solution is delivered with standard analytics/reports which can help accelerate the reporting process. Customers with an existing BI/Analytical platform can also access data from the Infor cloud to populate on-premise databases / data warehouses in order to continue using those platforms.
Releases
In the cloud, customers receive automated product updates on a regular cadence. This schedule is designed to result in minimal disruption to operations.
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.
None ! 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.
Authentic accompanies, advises and assists its customers before the activation of updates. Impact analysis and extensive testing are part of our expertise.
Testing
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.
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.
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.
Authentic accompanies its customers in the realization of these essential tests and can realize them in a partial way (only the interfaces for example) or in total. This service can be provided via our myCOD support offer.
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.
Security
Infor cloud offers a secured environment designed to help keep your organization’s data safe. The quick- and everchanging 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.
Disaster recovery
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.
Infor’s business continuity plan aims to provide the ability for both Infor and subscription customer operations to continue with minimal impact in the event of a disaster. The multi-tenant cloud architecture is designed with business continuity in mind and provides high availability designed to help reduce, or even eliminate, customer downtime should a disaster event be declared.
Business continuity procedures are designed to enable Infor to leverage multiple data centers within the applicable region to help deliver uninterrupted access to Infor CloudSuite by automated failover (multi-tenant only).