We are considering migrating on prem Epicor servers to the cloud for a number of reasons(below). I’m looking for feedback from people who have crossed this bridge already. Please note we are a small 50 person company that hosts most of our servers on prem via VMware ESX hosts.
One factor we are considering is we have extensive customization that are reading data directly from Epicor, I understand these will not work if Epicor hosts for us as they don’t allow direct DB access(I don’t agree with this but that is not my decision). So given this and that I’ve read many prefer not to let Epicor host(lose access/control) it sounds like Azure is a popular solution for hosting.
What are the big downsides of migrating(costs and performance are the two big unknowns for me, but I realize I don’t know what I don’t know so there may be other big downsides to be aware of)?
Reasons for considering moving to the cloud:
-We can’t justify “refreshing” our on prem server hardware every 4-5 years to keep it current so vendors(VMWare) will provide us support - this is a huge cost or we risk running critical software with no support from the vendor
-We would prefer to minimize downtime of our webstore (pulls data from Epicor) when we need to patch our servers(ESX, BIOS, etc) and don’t want to invest in high availability - a huge cost for a small company
-We would prefer to push cyber security requirements off to a third party(PCI DSS, and possibly DoD DFARs) so we can focus on our core business
-We suspect with economies of scale someone in the business of hosting(Azure, etc) can provide services at economical costs we can’t(high availability, hardware refresh, network / security / systems engineers on staff) to provide expertise a small company wouldn’t be able to staff for
Well you still can, if you pay extra for the “read only db”. Its an almost-live copy of the production database.
Having worked on both on premise and cloud systems, the cloud (public cloud) performance is better than the on prem, to my amazement. And the on prem was a hearty system spec’d above Epicor’s hardware sizing guide.
Biggest downside is the forced upgrade schedule. For example, 2023.2 we will have only from Monday October 9 to Friday November 3 to test it. Sure hope they don’t introduce any special new bugs this release.
Certainly, as with the Kinetic interface, they will have to redo a lot anyway.
That’s why we flex, we are on flex plan 2, I believe. Gives us a bit more time, and some bugs are ironed out.
With the portal coming (when?), upgrades will be easier, as they can be done by the end user, in a window before (eventual) forced upgrade.
We use the public cloud, we are pretty happy with it for the most part.
Most data issues can be worked around, and you will be happy you did when you are done.
Functions are a god-send. You also still have access to the Db context if needed. Though you should exercise caution if you decide to write with it.
While we haven’t migrated to the cloud. A couple more things to think about:
1. Licensing will switch from concurrent to named licensing. We have facilities in different time zones and different countries. We save a lot because concurrent licensing reduces our costs.
2. Support can be hard to deal with for the issues we have. A lot of times I’m able to dig into the database and use some debugging tools on the binaries to figure out what is going on so I can help them resolve the issue. This has saved me many hours of going through the support scripts to get cases presented to development.
3. We have several replicas in place in Azure for reporting and compliance needs. When you add this feature in the cloud, it (in my opinion) becomes way overpriced which , when you combine it with the licensing costs, makes it cost prohibitive to switch.
We worked with a company to help us get set up in Azure and the performance is night and day when compared to our previous on-prem setup and first data center experience. I have no idea how it compares to the cloud performance.
It is a good practice to perform latency checks with the cloud location you are planning to use. Latency can have a significant impact on performance and responsiveness.
I could have sworn when we entertained the idea of switching to cloud, we were told we had to license each user. Unfortunately, with the job switch and the switch back, finding those e-mails were a bit more challenging than I anticipated…you’re right, they quoted us concurrent licenses.
I just switched companies recently, but at the last company we went from on-prem E10 to Kinetic cloud and the performance was much better.
If the company is not in a place to keep up VMware ESX hosts, then it may be a good idea to just switch most of it to a cloud solution like Azure. Then just keep the necessities onsite which could be a single server. Cost doesn’t change much other than going from a cap ex to an op ex, at least from what I have seen in the past.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by a “Customization reading directly from Epicor” other than maybe a SQL view? However, most of the cases presented for DB queries were simply outside access to data. We got around it by calling BAQs through REST and pulling the data when needed, including those pesky Excel files.
Epicor Support will also set up an FTP if you’re looking for file exports for things like Bartender labels.
As Kevin mentioned, the admin portal coming out is going to be a big game changer for those worried about “losing control” (I know, we all do eventually). The ability to restart the app server, task agent, refresh the DB, upgrades are all part of it at the time I left. It takes away a lot of the slowness of going through support.
We just went live on Cloud from E9 where we were on Prem. Most of the time the performance does seem faster. However those times where it’s not are not more difficult to troubleshoot. You definitely lose some control over being able to restart app servers and customizations as others have said.
We are in the same boat and have a lot of external connections to other programs, reports, etc. So I opted for the Read Only Database and most of those connections moved over pretty well.
I’m not a fan of the annual maintenance costs considering we didn’t have any support when on Prem (that was a whole separate topic recently), but offloading the server maintenance, backups, security etc are a plus.
