Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations is Now…

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations is now Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, Enterprise edition. Microsoft’s latest offering is comprehensive and covers the scope of both Operations and Finance and demonstrates how Microsoft is continuing to deliver the global features and functionality that customers want and need.

This month, Microsoft announced that the local business data deployment option for on-premises deployments became generally available on June 28, 2017. In addition to the option to deploy Finance and Operations as a Microsoft managed service running in Microsoft Azure, customers now can deploy it in their own data center to help meet the needs of their business.

The on-premises deployment option (also referred to as local business data) provides a unique differentiator to enterprise customers versus other ERP products by providing a choice as customers can start on-premises and have the option to easily move their solution to the cloud, when they are ready, to take advantage of cloud scale and the rich analytic experiences it delivers. The on-premises solution is based on a modern architecture that focuses on leveraging Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 to bring forward a deployment running in a customer’s data center.

Microsoft maintains that deployment in their Cloud Service is the best deployment option, however, they understand customers may need to support business process execution in their data centers in certain cases. With on-premises deployments, customers can address these core business requirements:

• Data Residency – Some government and industry regulations require customers to store business data locally. In some cases, this is also mandated by our customer’s IT standards.
• Business Continuity – Whether you have a production facility, a warehouse, or a service shop, we can run your mission critical business processes locally in the facility when network latencies cannot be relied upon. On-premises deployments provide enhanced business continuity for scenarios that require low latency integrations with other on-premises systems or require deployments in regions where there are no options for a reliable network infrastructure. In some cases, local infrastructure issues can be addressed, along with a financially backed SLA, with Azure ExpressRoute.
• Data Center investments – Customers can leverage recent hardware investments as well as their IT staff that are already working with familiar Microsoft interfaces and tools such as Windows 2016 and SQL Server 2016 to run their Finance and Operations instance locally. Customers have the option to lift on-premises deployments to the cloud when it is time for a refresh.

On-premises deployments is the next step in our journey to support the deployment options that our customers have asked for to meet their business needs. Finance and Operations is unique in our ability to allow customers to deploy where ever and how ever they want, and with the introduction later this year of the cloud + edge deployment option, we will deliver the best of on-premises and cloud deployments in one option to help support our customers worldwide.

Microsoft has a comprehensive set of resources you can find here that can help you learn about, and prepare for, on-premises deployments including the system requirements as well as what you need to do to download and provision the software.