Seamless Cloud Migration with D365 Business Central Online

 

Seamless Cloud Migration with D365 Business Central Online

We take a deep dive into a recent blog from Microsoft where they explore how easily you can adapt and innovate faster with ERP Cloud Solutions. In a fast-paced digital world, on-premises ERP and other business management systems might slow your organisation down – and even hold it back. Shifting these systems to the cloud provides the business agility, scalability, and innovation required to get and stay ahead.

Check out the insights below to see how you can easily embrace cloud migration with Dynamics 365 Business Central and see how you can:

• Streamline migration to a cloud environment, improving operational efficiency.
• Increase scalability and flexibility to enable rapid responses to new demands and opportunities.
• Foster innovation and creativity with built-in AI technologies.

Embrace Agility and Innovation

In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, organisations must make fast decisions and embrace agile practices to reshape their operations while ensuring stability and continuity. Inflexible, outdated, and disconnected systems often pose risks that hinder their ability to respond promptly, seize new opportunities, and minimize disruption.

Survey Insights

In the recent Microsoft Dynamics 365 Future of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Survey, it was discovered that:

• 93% of business leaders advocate the benefits of adopting flexible and integrated ERP systems.
• However, only a mere 39% expressed confidence in their current ERP system’s flexibility and integration capabilities to effectively leverage resources for business model transformation.

This insight is crucial, particularly for organisations with legacy on-premises solutions that may struggle to meet new business demands.

Challenges of On-Premises Systems

Businesses relying on on-premises ERP and business management systems face challenges including:

• Slow responsiveness and delayed decision-making due to disconnected data and lack of real-time information.
• Greater vulnerability to security threats and challenges in meeting compliance due to a lack of advanced capabilities and resources.
• Difficulty competing with peers that embrace new AI-powered technologies dependent on cloud solutions.

This post also looks how the shift to cloud solutions empowers organisations to tackle challenges and thrive in a demanding era and explores Microsoft’s Accelerate, Innovate, Move (AIM) program for a smooth cloud transition.

Meet New Demands with Cloud Innovation

The importance of business agility in today’s quickly shifting economy can’t be emphasised enough. With economic volatility and swiftly changing consumer preferences.

77% of business leaders acknowledge that these conditions are the most critical factors driving the need for agile business operations. Prioritising agility enables organisations to respond effectively to evolving market conditions and gain a competitive advantage.

 

Improve Security When Moving to the Cloud

Another vital benefit that organisations gain by migrating to the cloud is the rapid innovation of security and compliance capabilities. The cloud helps protect business continuity, streamline IT operations, and navigate challenging compliance obligations as businesses grow.

Enhanced Security Measures

Microsoft invests heavily in security measures and has the resources and expertise to implement and maintain higher levels of security than an individual organization could achieve on-premises. This is particularly important for small to medium-sized businesses, which often lack the resources to keep pace with evolving security threats.

A recent Microsoft study shows that 70% of organisations with under 500 employees are susceptible to human-operated ransomware attacks, with these attacks becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. They often target unmanaged devices, which lack proper security controls, and 80 to 90% of successful ransomware compromises originate from such devices. This poses a significant security risk for on-premises organisations that lack the advanced security available in the cloud.

 

Advanced Threat Detection

Microsoft customers benefit from 135 million managed devices providing security and threat landscape insights and utilise advanced threat detection with 65 trillion signals synthesised daily using AI and data analytics. Moving to the cloud enables organisations to rapidly innovate and simplify the implementation of essential security practices, threat detection, and device management, granting them better protection.

Simplified Compliance

While cloud technologies offer enhanced cybersecurity, they also help simplify compliance with regulatory standards, which is equally important. Managing complex certifications independently is challenging, with 65% of firms struggling with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. Microsoft assists customers in assessing data protection controls and offers solutions for compliance, including GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), International Organization for Standardization 27701 (ISO 27701), International Organization for Standardization 27001 (ISO 27001), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), and more, enabling rapid and scalable compliance.

With Dynamics 365, organisations can confidently improve the security of their business systems when they move to the cloud. With access to advanced technology for scaling and managing security, as well as a network of thousands of specialized security experts, Microsoft provides tools and resources to ensure your migration goes as smoothly as possible.

Unlock AI and Productivity with the Cloud

One compelling reason for business leaders to transition from on-premises to the cloud is the potential for enhancing daily work and productivity with collaborative applications and AI. With 73% of business leaders emphasizing the importance of productivity improvements and 80% acknowledging the transformative role of AI, the cloud offers the means to establish hybrid work models, harness automation, and leverage artificial intelligence, resulting in a significant boost in overall productivity.

Microsoft Copilot

With the recent introduction of Microsoft Copilot, businesses can use transformative AI technology that offers new ways to enhance workplace efficiency, automate mundane tasks, and unlock creativity. At a time when two in three people say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job, Copilot helps to free up capacity and enables employees to focus on their most meaningful work.

While productivity can be enhanced with Copilot and AI, the combination of these tools with other cloud capabilities, such as collaborative applications, transforms the way work is conducted. By seamlessly connecting Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Excel) with Dynamics 365, businesses can swiftly make strides in improving productivity through cloud adoption. This connection between employees, data, and applications reduces context switching, centralizes workflows, and promotes efficient actions.

Reducing Context Switching

According to Harvard Business Review, the cost of switching between applications is just over two seconds, and the average user toggles between different apps nearly 1,200 times per day. This translates to spending just under four hours per week reorienting themselves after switching to a new application. Annually, this adds up to five working weeks or 9% of their total work time. The opportunity to connect employees to data and collaborative tools with the cloud will save valuable time and enable organizations to achieve more.

Move to the Cloud with AIM

Microsoft’s mission is to empower organisations to embrace cloud technologies and help enable a smooth transition. To accomplish this goal, we have introduced AIM, which stands for Accelerate, Innovate, Move.

AIM is a comprehensive program designed to provide organisations with a tailored path to confidently migrate critical processes to the cloud. This initiative helps organisations optimiae their systems for enhanced business agility, security, and AI technology integration. AIM offers qualified customers access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, expert assessments, investment incentives, valuable tools, and robust migration support.

When moving from on-premises to the cloud, customers can anticipate a positive ROI. Comprehensive studies reveal that over a three-year period, Dynamics 365 ERP solutions demonstrate strong customer ROI:

Dynamics 365 Business Central with an impressive 172% ROI

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, organisations can confidently embrace cloud migration, equipping themselves with essential capabilities to excel in a rapidly changing economy.

Next Steps

In our previous blog we highlighted how here at Simply Dynamics, we are  helping our customers to make it is easier than ever to move from Dynamics on-premises systems to the cloud.

Here’s How!

If you are currently operating in a Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, or D365 Business Central On-Premise environment – there is no better time to consider a move to the cloud with Dynamics 365 Business Central Online and transform your business operations!

To help our Customers with the move, we are offering a FREE Assessment Workshop where our D365 Dynamics Specialists will guide you through a seamless transition to Dynamics 365 Business Central Online.

This assessment offers the opportunity to scope and highlight the real value of migrating from Dynamics on-premises solutions to Dynamics 365 in the cloud.

Read the full blog and book your FREE Assessment Workshop Now