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Ever since Microsoft introduced the Dynamics ERP platform, it’s grown in both capabilities and market share, offering mid-size enterprises and larger organizations with remote subsidiaries the ability to manage their operations and business without incurring the costs typically incurred from the use of other ERP packages.
And now, through the support offered for Dynamics on the Azure cloud computing platform, organizations can leverage the power of both the Dynamics ERP package and the Azure cloud computing platform, to provide an integrated, complete architecture to meet their corporate ERP requirements.
Related Article: How to Evaluate a Cloud Accounting and ERP Software Replacement
Dynamics Enters the Cloud
One of the most significant changes to the software industry in the last decade has been the introduction of cloud computing. It’s no great revelation to say that cloud computing has disrupted the software industry and IT in general, offering organizations the ability to virtualize and migrate their infrastructure, including computing, storage and network resources, allowing them to be provisioned in an automated, on-demand fashion, and removing day-to-day platform management, further reducing costs to the organization.
Dynamics, for its part, is well suited to operations within a cloud environment, and hast been hosted for years by various cloud providers. And for a while now, Microsoft has offered support for Dynamics on the Azure cloud platform, creating a single solution that combines the capabilities and functionality of Dynamics with the stability, extensibility and cost savings of the Azure cloud platform.
Recognizing the Benefits of the Cloud
Hosting Microsoft Dynamics ERP software on Microsoft Azure brings a number of benefits for organizations, such as:
Azure is built not only to support Dynamics, but the integration of Dynamics with other applications.
Because, in this model, Microsoft owns both the software and hosting platform, along with other applications, it makes integration that much easier. For example – Microsoft has made integration with Office 365 very easy, allowing the two applications to work together to provide reporting and other functions quickly. Also, because both applications and the underlying platform are all provided by the same company, it makes updates and patches that much easier to automate and implement. Likewise, security at the application layer becomes more streamlined and coherent.
Azure provides greater cost savings over traditional computing approaches.
Software used to be primarily installed onto hardware that was purchased and maintained by customer organizations. That’s no longer the case. In the Azure model, with all of the major components (computing, storage and network) supplied by the platform, and management of those components supplied by the cloud provider, companies and organizations can realize significant savings over traditional deployments, when the costs for hardware refresh, management and licensing are all factored.
In addition to cost savings, cloud environments allow organizations more flexibility.
One of the primary benefits of cloud computing lies not only in the cost savings, but the flexibility that cloud computing provides. In a cloud model, organizations can rapidly implement test/dev environments that allow them to test new configurations without impacting production, and tear down those same environments once they’ve proven the concept. Cloud computing also allows organizations to scale resources rapidly, and integrate new systems dynamically, as the company grows organically and through mergers and acquisitions.
Azure lets you host more than just Dynamics, all within the same infrastructure.
By hosting Microsoft Dynamics ERP software on Microsoft Azure, organizations gain a significant advantage over those that follow a software-as-a-service model – namely, that the Azure cloud platform can host much more than the Dynamics platform. Azure is a platform that’s capable of hosting cloud-ready applications and infrastructure of all kinds, from web servers to storage platforms to applications, utilizing a wide range of configurations and operating systems.
This allows companies to place other applications, like HR systems and data analytics systems, within the same environment as their Dynamics platform, eliminating latency and increasing performance of the environment. It also allows organizations to place the entire environment under a unified management domain, simplifying operations and allowing resources to be shared across applications. And, because Microsoft has announced the deployment of Azure within data centres in Canada, data residency requirements for Canadian organizations and businesses can also be met, all within the same environment.