We "recently" moved to hosting for our LSF environment, and moved our Landmark subscription licensing to the "CloudSuite" licensing.
Benefits to Cloud:
No hardware to manage!
Fewer roles needed to keep the system running.
More predictable pricing structure - Infor has also seemed willing to flex on some licensing to help in the transition to cloud.
Risk Management & Security is [hopefully] displaced to someone else (Amazon-AWS / AMS-infor). They keep data "secure" and have all sorts of certifications via Amazon - AWS to prove it.
Cons:
The most difficult thing to deal with, if you're a technical user, is the loss of system control and the sudden restrictions on inforxtreme that you'll encounter (loss of downloads and documentation).
Get used to hearing from AMS - "Sorry we don't provide that information to hosted clients". Or - "That's our job to check on, not yours". They also wanted to remove client access to monitoring tools to check the server health... that didn't work :|.
My organization had some difficulty working with Support (AMS) due to some a prominent knowledge gap in many of the resources, but they are improving.
If they avoid answering your question, they're not trying to be rude... they probably just don't know enough about the system... though this is typical of many support groups I've encountered throughout the industry.
If you are a 24/7 operation, high priority industry, things to look out for will be the same as if your system is internally hosted. And I mean even the basic, ABC-101 things:
-Was the install/update/data copy/migration/minor file change/configuration change/anything performed correctly?
-Did they set you up with the proper server configuration? Heap/Nonheap Memory? Disk Space? Database?
-Did they perform system configurations according to their documentation?
-Did they update their hosts files properly and recycle the systems in the proper order...
-Did they perform the upgrade steps correctly?
-Is the grid up and running (landmark)
-Check the system logs....
-Latency issues - AWS hosting can lag, so you may need to keep up on your network setup depending on how you integrate with the systems. (you might have mysterious timeout issues)
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Make sure you schedule UPDATES for your system - I'm talking the VM & "physical" server. If you use windows - make sure you have security patching
scheduled immediately or *cough**cough* you may find your server a few years behind on security updates, and you might find a few common web vulnerabilities delivered with the WAS setup. (Needless to say, "always up to date & secure " is intended to be taken loosely)
-Security Security Security. Did I mention look at your security setup?
So on and so forth.
Another difference is that now you'll need to open a ticket every time you want to look through new documentation, look at any detailed logs, and so on. Access is more of an issue with Landmark CloudSuite than the LSF environment, where you can still request access (depending on your license) to FTP to the server directories for LSF.
-Do not expect a "rapid response" for issues, even some production down issues. Although, to be fair, no hosting organization can respond as quickly to anything compared to your software being internally hosted.
-"System Monitoring" - they usually catch LSF issues, not so much with Landmark issues. So have a setup to monitor your system on your own.
I'd say 85-90% of our landmark issues are identified by us, and because we monitor the system on our own. I don't even mean sneaky issues... I'm talking about issues like grid nodes being down for hours, or extremely high system utilization shooting sparks in the logs for days... yeah. But if there's a disk utilization issue or certain hung threads on WAS, sure, they can catch it.
My org can be paranoid about system access and monitoring, so view my opinions through that lens.
Also, some of my concerns about the performance of support/cloud are typical of the IT industry, so it's not a specific dig against any one organization in particular.
Even with all of these cons - the co$t savings are potentially very great and may be worth the drastic increase in the number of headaches given to your internal IT resources.