Companies and organizations ultimately live and die by the numbers. Revenue, membership, customers, costs, taxation – all of these are critical elements to the success of any company, and all of them require special analysis to maximize returns and reduce costs to the enterprise.
And as a finance professional, it’s your job to analyze what can be a massive amount of data, to find those trends and datasets that directly affect your bottom line.
There are a couple of different scenarios where Azure may make sense for customers. First, some existing infrastructure may be nearing the end of life. Thus, you may be evaluating the potential of a large capital outlay to replace servers and storage. Azure can help you to replace that type of buying process and move to a new type of storage and backup model. Near the end of life for existing infrastructure is a great point to have that conversation.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics was created with the enterprise in mind, and that includes the financial aspects as well. Dynamics is largely designed for financial professionals, offering features such as complete visibility into your company’s financial health via dashboard views and reporting; automated invoicing, payment systems, and automated financial regulatory compliance; and automated processes and budget reduction, among others.
As a financial professional, it’s pretty easy to see the value that Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides to the enterprise. But one question that many financial professionals don’t always think about is – given the importance of such an important application to my company, what’s being done to ensure that it will always be available and functional for my company? And what would happen if it’s not? These are very good questions.
Enter Microsoft Azure
In days past, applications like Dynamics were installed and maintained on servers that individual companies and organizations maintained themselves, usually in an internal server room data center, or even a glorified closet. But for mission-critical applications like Dynamics, that just doesn’t work anymore.
That’s why it makes a lot of sense to migrate your environment into something that’s stable, resilient, and offers the ability to expand the functionality of your mission-critical apps, rather than limit them.
Microsoft Azure offers a number of advantages for Dynamics, including:
- Uptime and Business Continuance – Because Azure is a cloud-based platform, spread globally among a large number of data centers and supported by massive and redundant computing, storage, and network, it provides a much more robust environment that almost anything an individual company is likely to build.
- Application Integration – One of the great things about Azure is that it isn’t simply for hosting, and it provides a large range of functionality like business intelligence, data mining, and other highly useful enterprise functions that allow enterprises to find new ways to generate revenue, streamline finances, and identify trends that will protect and grow the enterprise now and in the future.
- Scalability – As your enterprise grow, so the Dynamics platform in Azure will grow, supporting anything from a small business to the largest corporations and organizations in the world, all without the need to migrate the platform. Both Dynamics and Azure are purpose-built for truly massive scalability.
Ease Pressure on Existing Capacity
Another reason why you may need the services of Azure is when existing capacity is unable to keep up with demand. So maybe the infrastructure you have today isn’t older and needs to be replaced. But the needs of the business are starting to outgrow those services. Maybe there is a business critical app that’s consuming more resources than you initially planned for, and you are looking at additional hardware investments to support that and keep the rest of the services up and running. In that case, you may build a hybrid model where you extend the existing data center to Azure. Also, you may potentially move that resource intensive application or some of the other underlying companion applications that might be struggling for some of the resources. That mission critical application could be a good example of a good use case for Azure and where it can confide into the existing business without necessarily replacing the on-premise infrastructure.
Create Scalability
The other reason is when your business needs to grow around availability, redundancy or scalability. Maybe a line of business app has only had a single server supporting it to date. However, the use of that business app is growing faster than what was anticipated by the IT department. These could all be great examples of where Azure can be used to augment that existing on-premise infrastructure. You may move the entire data center out to Azure, and that can make sense for your business. We can help you with your Azure migration.
And those are just the highlights. At Technology Management Concepts we specialize in both Dynamics and hosting, among other things. Visit our Microsoft Cloud Business Solutions to learn more about our solutions in order to further your understanding of financial and business management systems. Team up with a certified Microsoft Gold Partner to make your migration to the cloud seamless. If you have any questions regarding Dynamics 365 or other ERP/CRM systems, contact us.
Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for insightful tutorials and demos.
