INFOR Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

On-Premise
System availability must be maintained by the customer for on-premise Infor applications. Infor response targets for incident support are still applicable, but the customer is responsible for maintaining the availability of the system infrastructure and application deployments.

Cloud
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.

On-Premise
With an on-premise solution, customers own and control access to the data. There can be complex internal rules that govern data access, and there can also be security concerns in an on-premise environment.
Infor does not control or have access to the data or systems in an on-premise environment. If a customer needs support, the customer can demonstrate what the system is doing, but Infor does not have the unilateral ability to take control of the system to help address the issue.

Cloud
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, and only personnel with proper clearance have read-only access to such customer data for certain limited purposes (e.g. troubleshooting support issues).
To troubleshoot support incidents, Infor Support and Infor Cloud Operations have controlled read-only access to the customer’s back-end data in any production and non-production environments. If back-end data needs to be modified in order to address a support issue, then Infor Support will be able to modify such data in a non-production environment, using the standard product front-end user interface (UI) options for troubleshooting with customer approval, which requires that customer has provided Infor with certain system access credentials.

On-Premise

With an on-premise solution, implementing available updates can vary based on the customer’s schedule, as the process is usually manual. Because of this, there is a risk that customers may miss out on the latest patches and lag behind in versions, which could result in the need for a time-consuming, major upgrade to get to the latest version. In terms of planning for updates, customers typically have to obtain buy-in internally and must formally manage the process themselves. Likewise, testing and applying patches also falls to the customer. If there is a regulatory release, Infor will send a communication. Outside of regulatory releases, customers have to rely on their internal teams to look for updates in the Infor Download Center of the support portal. Product updates that are available through the portal will be based upon the applicable support agreement, as such, customers will only see updates to which they are entitled. Customers often struggle to schedule updates in a timely fashion given the need for multiple departments to approve. IT often has to compete with other business costs in order to justify the benefits of deploying the updates. For on-premise solutions, new features are often only available when the deployment is upgraded to latest release. Customers can apply custom updates, but in the event something breaks, Infor does not provide support for the customized solution unless there is a separate customization support agreement in place.

Cloud

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). Detailed information on the planned monthly multi-tenant maintenance windows can be obtained here.

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 productiontenant. Major updates generally occur, or are activated, twice a year.

On-Premise

For on-premise solutions, the customer is responsible for investigating, triaging, and defining resolutions for security threats and staying up to date on security patching. Due to the general lack of automated security patching in an on-premise environment, there may be a higher risk of a security breach. Encryption capability is product specific. However, customer is ultimately responsible for encrypting data.

Cloud

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.

On-Premise
Disaster recovery responsibility for both hardware and software failures falls to the customer. The fault tolerance is only as good as the customer is able to maintain, both in cost and resources. Ultimately, it falls to the customer’s experts to take the lead internally to provide solutions to problems.
If a customer needs assistance with drafting a disaster recovery plan for on-premise applications, both Infor and certain authorized Infor partners offer such services, at an additional cost.

Cloud
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.