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.
As for logs, Kevin also had a good write up on getting around that. I believe this is also set to be in the cloud admin portal. Server Event Log Dashboard - Experts’ Corner - Epicor User Help Forum (epiusers.help)
I am linking another thread I just posted a question to utilizing Azure, that may be another route to take using a couple Azure services. I’m curious to see what others have done in Azure. Kinetic App Server - Kinetic 202X - Epicor User Help Forum (epiusers.help)