Coordinating your business’s processes, from monitoring your data flow to ensuring it is secure and that operations perform optimally, can be challenging without Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environments.
While an ERP system is beneficial for your business, the infrastructure significantly affects how you manage the environment to serve your organization’s needs better. On-premise ERP has a limit to how much flexibility it can offer, with scalability constraints, rigid capital costs and considerable management difficulty. Such factors make your business vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks, especially when running end-of-life infrastructure and on-premises applications that don’t provide essential security updates. Here are some ERP to Azure migration recommendations to help ensure you are successful with the shift.
Performing an ERP cloud migration to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud protects your infrastructure against security hazards and supports you in meeting your business objectives cost-effectively. However, before going into the benefits of cloud solutions, there are options besides moving your current on-premise ERP implementation to the Azure platform.
Options for Managing Your On-Premises ERP
Software end-of-support is a major driving force for businesses to move their on-premises applications to the cloud. Organizations using Microsoft Dynamics AX or NAV are vulnerable to security breaches because their software stops being supported. These ERP packages, including Dynamics GP, require updates or extended support to keep the environment secure. However, in most cases, updating your ERP software requires upgrading your infrastructure. With on-premises systems, you use significant resources, including the time you can spend making critical business decisions. Possible options for managing your on-premises ERP to fit your business operations include:
- Buying extended support
- Moving your ERP system to Dynamics 365 Business Central or Finance
- Migrating your ERP solution to Microsoft Azure
Purchasing extended support can lead to expenses exceeding your budget with VM resources that you may not use and getting additional packages to keep up your ERP environment after the end-of-support date. If your business uses Dynamics AX, switching to Dynamics 365 Finance can be the logical move as the ERP system descends from the Dynamics AX product line.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a reliable option for small businesses. Besides upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can lift and shift your on-premises ERP applications to Azure to reduce your infrastructure’s maintenance costs and improve your processes within a secure cloud environment.
Benefits of ERP to Azure Migration
Migrating your on-premises ERP systems to Azure can seem intimidating, giving the impression that it requires more resources to move than manage. The right IT solutions partner will help you take a hands-off approach during the process to ensure your infrastructure remains intact and workflow efficiency improves.
Deploying ERP applications on Azure enables you to use Azure IaaS offering and access VMs with several networking and storage options. After the Azure migration, you manage and secure your business’s operating systems, security and data while Azure handles infrastructure maintenance.
Benefits of ERP migration to Azure include:
- Cost savings
- Flexibility
- Ease of management
- Site recovery options
Costs Savings
When using on-premises infrastructure, upgrading your systems can mean spending capital costs to extend your resources in a manner that meets your business’s demands. These costs need to cover hardware, maintenance, personnel and upgrades. The downside of increasing your resources in this way is spending on VMs that may only be active during seasonal peaks.
Migrating your ERP systems to Azure helps you avoid such up-front capital spending because you save costs on buying on-premises server hardware and license. You can use reliable Azure infrastructure with enterprise-level security from Microsoft. With Azure IaaS, you can migrate to the most suitable global data center and focus on your operations.
Flexibility
Mounting your ERP environments on Azure IaaS gives you more flexibility to deploy new servers, migrate existing ones and manage integrations using automation. Spinning up a new server is no hassle because you can do it within minutes from Azure’s available options, choosing a server according to your specifications.
This flexibility ensures your applications are secure with a degree of protection as Azure VMs’ virtual hard drives are geo-replicated to a second Azure data center. Hence, if some Azure hardware experiences a failure, you have enough backup to avoid downtime. ERP environments on Azure can quickly scale to meet fluctuating workload demands and several deployment scenarios in real-time, ensuring your operations maintain peak performance regardless of the dynamic needs of your organization.
Azure VM sizes are available in various types, including:
- General purpose
- Compute optimized
- Memory optimized
- Storage optimized
- GPU
- High performance compute
These VMs can help your business handle workloads, from development and testing to data warehousing and computation demanding high-throughput network interfaces.
Ease of Management
Migrating to Azure helps you eliminate the need to manage on-premises IT assets, including on-site servers. The ease of management frees up more resources you can channel to other business aspects. Maintaining on-premises applications requires consistent firewall testing to safeguard against security breaches, which needs an all-hands approach from your IT team at all times. Extending your workforce to handle both security and performance optimization is arduous.
With Azure migration, your infrastructure gets timely security updates, helping you avoid downtimes and data loss. From state-of-the-art data protection to advanced disaster recovery, you get access to automatically scheduled infrastructure upgrades with minimal involvement from your IT team.
Site Recovery
The Azure Site Recovery service helps your organization adopt a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy where you can secure your data and keep your workloads and applications online during outages.
During downtimes or outages, your businesses can lose customers or revenue due to the inability of your processes to function. Azure Site Recovery services ensure your business operations keep running without interruptions by replicating workloads on physical and virtual machines from a primary site to a secondary location. Hence, when the prior site experiences an outage, you can move to the secondary location to handle your operations and back to the primary site when running again.
Azure provides several database products, including Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database Migration Service. These products help you handle workloads like building applications that scale with a managed and intelligent SQL server database in the cloud, with guaranteed low latency and high availability anywhere, or fast-tracking your transition to the cloud using a simple, self-guided migration process.
Manage ERP to Azure Migration Process to Enhance Your Business’s Growth
With the proper support, you can conveniently migrate ERP to Azure cloud platform and avoid downtime or a drop in operational performance. The team of experts at ne Digital assists clients to define ERP to Azure migration steps, optimizing their workflows and driving business growth. Our wealth of experience includes successfully migrating multiple ERP implementations such as Deacom, Syspro and Sage, running them with a co-managed services approach. This model enables your business’s internal team to seamlessly collaborate with our support and expertise to tailor the right cloud services according to your needs. Visit our Azure Services Portfolio to learn more about how we can boost your IT infrastructure’s value.
