Most organizations have application development teams that are very good at meeting the functional needs of their solutions, but only some have the experience with the operational and scalability aspects that come with serving hundreds or thousands of customers from a shared solution. Infor has almost15 years of experience with couple of dozen solutions operating in Infor cloud in this mode. The Infor Cloud Architecture and DevOps team has worked with many of the internal product development teams to guide the product engineering teams in architecting their products for cloud. While each enterprise application has its own unique architectural characteristics, we have designed a generic scorecard to measure the readiness of an enterprise application for cloud. Based on the scorecard the applications are classified as Cloud 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

Cloud 1.0

Cloud 1.0 applications are not architected for Multi-Tenancy and therefore are not true Cloud applications. Cloud 1.0 applications could be web-enabled or thick client applications and are usually hosted as Single Tenant in a public cloud. In Single Tenant model, customers get their own dedicated environment, and usually each customer deployment is completely isolated from another customer using VLAN/VPC. Cloud 1.0 applications are hardware and labor intensive and therefore are offered at a higher price point. In some cases where data isolation or complete control of environment is desired, customers may actually prefer Cloud 1.0 applications. While the hardware cost of Single Tenant applications cannot be alleviated, the labor cost to provision and manage Cloud1.0 enterprise applications or suite of applications can be reduced by automated provisioning and hands free monitoring. Automation is leveraged for automated backup and recovery from failures. Usually Cloud 1.0 applications are connected to a customer network using virtual private network (VPN)tunnel, hence usually integration with on-premise applications to Cloud 1.0 applications deployed in public cloud can be done without needing any major modifications.

Cloud 2.0

Cloud 2.0 applications are truly multi-tenant, highly scalable and fault tolerant. Infor deploys all its Cloud 2.0 applications in multiple availability zones in an AWS region. This allows the application to achieve both high availability and disaster recovery. An AWS region is a geographically separate area, and each region has multiple, isolated data centers called availability zones. Each availability zone has its own isolated power, Internet connection etc., and is separated from another availability zone in the same region with minimal latency. Deploying Cloud 2.0 applications in multiple availability zones allows end users to continue to use the application even when a complete availability zone is not available.