Choosing the best NAV installation architecture is not always an easy task.
The first question that an IT staff has to decide is: should I go on-premise or should I want to embrace the cloud?
Normally, the ERP is a core software component for a company and this decision can affect your business a lot.
Statistically, about 49% of IT decision makers said that they are worried about the security implications of cloud services. Data protection, privacy, and availability are the main obstacles to cloud adoption.
But is this true?
When a company stores all its core data internally, it has more or less complete control over who can access the data and data availability. An IT decision maker normally considers the company's data more secured when it is stored in a data center that he/she can completely manage and protect from the devil outside world.
This could be true in theory, but the practice is often very different. Actually, there's no company that can guarantee a service level agreement and a security policy like the cloud. Obviously, a safe backup and data protection strategy must always be guaranteed, no matter if you go on-premise or on-cloud.
There are many other aspects to consider when choosing between on-premise or cloud-based solutions, as follows:
Infrastructure costs
Performance
Growth of solutions
Upgrades
On-premise architectures require an initial investment in order to buy the required hardware and software and to have experienced IT staff to manage the system. Once the system is fully functional, you will also require costs and time for periodically maintaining and upgrading the entire hardware and software solutions.
In a cloud-based architecture, normally you have a much lower initial cost (pay-as-you-go) and you don't have to take care of hardware maintenance. The cloud platform gives you these services.
The main obstacle in this field is certainly the latency of Internet connection. When you're on-premise, everything is on your LAN and performance is managed by the internals.
On a cloud-based solution, Internet connection and bandwidth are a requirement that can affect your business a lot. If the Internet connection is missing, your business could be blocked. If the bandwidth is poor and network latency is high (too much delay in data communication over the network), your working experience could be a pain. You need stable and high speed Internet connectivity to go on-cloud.
When you start a project, normally you analyze all the requirements and at the final stage you arrive at a final hardware size structure that satisfies your needs and maybe your predictable growth:
In an on-premise solution, you have your hardware infrastructure that satisfies your actual needs. If one day you have to increase the growth of your architecture, you have to review your hardware and invest money for on infrastructure upgrades.
In a cloud-based solution, if your business has big growth or during peak periods, you can easily expand your solutions by increasing the calculation performance or expand your infrastructure in new regions, all in an easy, quick, and transparent way (scaling).
With an on-premise architecture, you have complete control over your infrastructure's upgrades (hardware and software) and you can decide what type of upgrade to apply and when to apply it.
In an on-cloud architecture, you could have some aspects of the infrastructure where upgrades are not completely under your control but they can be deployed globally from the solution provider.
Here's a comparison between the different types of Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation previously discussed (pros and cons):
|
On-premise |
On-cloud with Azure VM |
On-cloud with Azure SQL |
SaaS (Dynamics 365) |
|
Physical hardware is required. |
No hardware is required. |
No hardware is required. |
No hardware is required. |
|
IT staff (internal or partners) is required for infrastructure maintenance and SLA. |
Infrastructure SLA comes from the Azure platform. IT tasks are reduced. |
Infrastructure service level agreements (SLAs) come from the Azure platform. IT tasks are reduced. |
No IT staff is required |
|
Software installation is required (server + NAV + clients). |
Server installation is deployed via the Azure portal. |
Server installation is deployed via the Azure portal. |
No installation is required. |
|
Predictable performances, but is difficult to scale. |
It is easy to scale as needed. |
It is easy to scale as needed. |
There is no control on scaling. |
|
It is not dependent on Internet connection. |
It is dependent on Internet connection. |
It is dependent on Internet connection. |
It is dependent on Internet connection. |
|
It involves high startup costs. |
It invovles medium startup costs. |
It involves medium startup costs. |
It involves low startup costs. |
|
There are no costs per usage. |
There are costs per usage (Azure VM). |
There are costs per usage, based on database throughput units (DTUs) consumed. |
There are costs per usage. |
|
SQL Server license is required. |
SQL Server license is required. |
No SQL Server license is required (Azure SQL has different pricing). |
No SQL Server license is required. |
|
Maximum DB size is based on SQL Server license. |
Maximum DB size is 16 terabytes (due to Azure VM disk restrictions). |
Maximum DB size is actually 1 terabyte (via the P11 offering). |
Actually, we have also a new value proposition by Microsoft: Microsoft Dynamics NAV Managed Services for Partners. With this PAAS proposition, Microsoft hosts your NAV database to the cloud and you build and sell your NAV solution to your customers.
This proposition could be interesting if your business model is repeatable, volume-oriented, and with a low cost of sale. The solution must be multitenant.
As a final consideration, we can say that nowadays a cloud-based solution has more benefits than risks. The only real limit to this choice is availability: if your cloud service shuts down or your Internet connection is down, your business could be at a huge risk.
If you decide to embrace the cloud for the deployment of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture, you have to carefully check your Internet connectivity and bandwidth and you have to carefully choose your cloud provider. It has to guarantee a big uptime (SLA) over time.
Note
For the Microsoft Azure SLA, you can check out https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/.