You work for a large craft supplies retail chain that has store locations throughout the southeastern U.S. About twenty years ago, the organization implemented ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to manage its inventory, sales, financials, and payroll. However, the software has not scaled well recently as the number of store locations have increased and customer expectations in the market have risen. For example, cashiers must manually enter prices or item numbers because the system isn't designed to support scanning barcodes. Customers frequently complain of long lines and of being charged the wrong amount for an item. You've been tasked with leading a team to spearhead some major upgrades to your company's systems that will improve the efficiency of inventory availability, speed up the checkout process, and feed transaction data directly into the recently updated accounting system. As you begin planning the upgrades and selecting software solutions, you have to make some key decisions. You've been talking with vendors about software and solutions that will meet the needs of your organization. The first decision you need to make is where this solution will be hosted. The current ERP is hosted on-premises at the home office location, but the hardware is old