Dynamics GP Azure implementations have been the norm the past few years. More and more companies are moving away from On Premise implementations.
As Valerie Miller notes in an article titled Microsoft Dynamics GP Users Increasingly Comfortable with the Cloud: New Survey, “CFOs have a strong influence on the choice of cloud. “Not a lot of CFOs like to part with large sums of money upfront for software and servers,” he observed, “so in having a conversation about changing the spend from a capital expenditure to an operational one, most CFOs would rather spend a few hundred dollars a month on something versus tens of thousands upfront.”” Customers on the pay-as-you-go plan also don’t have to pay additional maintenance and upgrade costs (Valerie Miller notes that Microsoft Dynamics GP customers using an On-Premise solution often don’t budget for the cost of upgrades, and so don’t keep their installs current. This may concern persons in charge who wish to maintain best practices).
Security is of course an overriding concern when it comes to the sensitive data and vital business functions supported by Microsoft Dynamics GP and other solutions like it. Therefore it’s worth noting that 58% of data breaches are caused by employees which in a nutshell, your data is more at risk on your own servers than in Microsoft’s large global datacenters. According to the Microsoft Azure site: “We were the first cloud provider recognized by the European Union’s data protection authorities for our commitment to rigorous EU privacy laws. Microsoft was also the first major cloud provider to adopt the new international cloud privacy standard, ISO 27018.” and, given the sloppy security practices that are all too common in many companies, there is certainly some weight to this argument.
There is another point of consideration for those who worry about the redundancy of their On-Premise systems. Instead of storing your company’s data on a single machine, Azure distributes your company’s data across multiple machines throughout Microsoft’s massive server architecture, instead of relying on one machine in a broom closet like many On Premise systems do. This provides a layer of redundancy that keeps your Dynamics GP deployment running in the event that maintenance needs to be performed on one of the machines. “As the best cloud service from Microsoft, Azure runs on a worldwide network of Microsoft-managed datacenters across 30 regions—more countries and regions than Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud combined.”
You may find yourself agreeing that the advantages of running your Microsoft Dynamics GP implementation on Azure are too strong to be ignored. Please contact us for more information.
