Kind of surprised there wasn’t more action on this post. I’ve been On Prem, Single Tenant Cloud, SaaS, and now moving from a local data center, IaaS, to Azure on our own - which is still IaaS.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say, “fully commit.” To gain the real benefits of using the cloud, it means doing things differently than we always have. Just putting Epicor in the cloud for the sake of doing cloud doesn’t really reap much benefits. Depending how you set it up, the cost is similar but you may experience poorer performance. There’s a balance between control and cost - the more control you want to keep doing things the same way the more it will cost. But the culture change is very, very hard.
In “The Unicorn Project”, the hero of the story was the developer behind the customized ERP system. Everybody loved the system because it was made just to the company’s specification. But she realized, it was slow to adapt to the new online world and changes in general. It didn’t lend itself to a DevOps culture and by the end of the book, she came to believe that they would be better off using a more standardized system with light modifications in order to keep expenses down and to be able to roll with changes easier.
So the question for you (and all companies) is are you adding value to the company while maintaining servers, operating system upgrades, patches, and physical and environmental conditions of the datacenter? Or do you add more value by moving the users and the ERP system together through training and customizations?
There’s no doubt that the loss of control with SaaS is challenging. And yet it is freeing too. It’s like Functional programming languages. Not being able to change the value of a variable is extremely limiting but it makes coding for multiple threads way easier. And so it is with the Cloud, there are so many more possibilities with linking cloud services together with On Prem resources (hybrid): source control, Actions, email, document management, system management, security, logging, data analysis, workflow, serverless, compliance, etc.
So if you think the IT staff can make the mindset change, I think it will pay off. If not, I think the next generation will end up doing it since the costs of staying On Prem will become a competitive disadvantage at some point and suffer from being severely underfunded.