One of the topic faced by decision-makers planning the implementation of Dynamics 365 Business Central is the choice between local implementation (on-premises) and using the cloud version. Both the on-premises and cloud versions have their advantages and limitations, and the choice between them can have a significant impact on the costs, flexibility and innovation of the enterprise. Below is a comparison of both options.
| On-Premise | SaaS/Cloud | |
| Physical server room – environment | Required purchase and maintenance of equipment (production, testing and development facilities). | As part of the license available for the production environment and 3 test/development environment. There is no server server at the client. |
| Physical server room – backup system
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Required purchase and maintenance of equipment for environment backup.
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| Physical server room – continuity of work | You must ensure the continuity of operation of the devices yourself (emergency power supply system, air-conditioning system for technical rooms, fire protection, network devices, environmental redundancy). | Adequate security provided by Microsoft as part of your subscription. |
| Physical server room – security | We take into account special security measures regarding access to servers, systems and databases, as well as anti-virus protection.
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| IT Administration/Support
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Required IT support team with a wide range of competences (including: servers, IT network, operating systems, MS SQL database servers, backup systems).
Continuous monitoring of the environment and examination of the health of systems is required.
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| Licenses
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Required purchase of licenses for operating systems, SQL servers, others (e.g. anti-virus, anti-spam protection). | |
| Environment updates – service windows
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Environment updates – service windows.
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Regularnie przestrzegany zgodnie z harmonogramem. |
| Upgrade Business Central
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Manual, upon customer request. The operation of upgrading the version involves the allocation of additional hardware and system resources and depends on the availability and competence of IT specialists.
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| Security backups
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Required to maintain your own backup management system.
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Continuous automatic data archiving provided by Microsoft as part of your subscription. |
| GDPR
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Required to implement your own GDPR compliance policy (GDPR).
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What are the arguments for using the cloud version?
- The cloud version is characterized by more flexible management of the number and type of users – you can freely increase or decrease the number of users depending on your needs.
- Possibility to extend the standard functionalities of Business Central thanks to applications available within AppSource.
- Automatic updates to the highest version of Dynamics 365 Business Central.
- Business Central in the cloud is closely integrated with various Microsoft solutions, including: Office, Power BI, Sharepoint, Power Apps.
- No need to incur the costs of Windows Server software and SQL database – it is already included in the price of the D365 Business Central subscription.
- No management of servers and IT equipment (no need to have equipment and IT administrator services).
- No software installation services on individual client computers (only an Internet connection and a web browser are needed).
- Microsoft is responsible for data security – data loss and corruption is very unlikely.
- Availability of Microsoft services is guaranteed at 99.9%.
- Backups are created automatically, without the need for such services to be provided by the IT administrator.
- Instead of a one-time license purchase, fees for Business Central in the cloud are settled monthly, flexibly adjusted to the number of users used.