Choosing cloud services for Microsoft Dynamics 365

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Choosing cloud services for Microsoft Dynamics 365If you picked up this white paper, your organization is likely planning to make a move to (or is at least considering) Microsoft Dynamics 365. Either way, you want to understand your options and what can be accomplished with Microsoft Dynamics in the cloud. We want to help you get there. Our fully managed cloud was specifically designed for Dynamics customers and supports its largest customer base in North America.

In Part 1, we start by examining how to align Dynamics 365 to support the goals of the organization.

In Part 2, we look at the cloud landscape for Dynamics 365, identifying the options (public, private, hybrid, on-premises) and overviewing the services that organizations should consider.

In Part 3, we share six adoption best practices. From securing executive buy-in to ensuring a user-centric deployment, we identify many of the tactical activities and considerations that drive adoption and success.

Of course, when you’re ready to make your move to Dynamics 365, so are we. Our DXC Concerto™ Cloud Advisory Services team can discuss your needs with you and conduct an assessment of your IT environment. From there, we can design a plan to meet your objectives.

Let’s get started.

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Table of contents

Part 1: Aligning Dynamics 365 to support the goals of the organization 3

Part 2: It is vital to understand your cloud options so you can make the right decision for your organization 4

Part 3: Driving adoption 6

Why DXC Concerto? 8

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Part 1: Aligning Dynamics 365 to support the goals of the organization

How does Dynamics 365 fit into your organization’s plans and goals? It’s an important question to ask, because successfully deploying Dynamics 365, like any multifaceted solution, takes considerable effort. A clear understanding of how the system will be utilized in the future directly informs further decisions on the cloud platform and the management effort needed to accomplish those goals. This determination is essential before beginning the move to Dynamics 365.

The benefit of Dynamics in the cloud

Dynamics 365 does far more than any traditional customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. Think of Dynamics 365 as a growing suite of business applications that can stand alone or work together. By connecting and uniting business processes in the cloud, traditional silos are gone. Dynamics 365 can power all types of business mission-critical activities in a modern and holistic way, including: sales, customer service, field service, talent (human resources), finance and operations, retail, project service automation, marketing, business intelligence and customer insights.

However, as much as we want to encourage organizations to propel their growth with modern business applications such as Dynamics 365, there are also options to modernize your current applications. The timing may not be right for your organization to move to Dynamics 365. Still, moving your current application to the cloud can deliver many benefits, including: connecting siloed applications or locations, consolidating data in the cloud for reporting, giving a legacy custom solution new life, offloading the ongoing management of on-premises infrastructure, or replacing aging hardware without the capital expenditures. Modernizing your current applications by moving them to the cloud enables future digital transformation and can ease the eventual migration to a new solution.

Mission-critical systems in the cloud

Dynamics 365 is available to run on premises. But you might consider the workload and available resources needed to manage your own infrastructure, given the cost, risks and requirements for your organization. DXC Concerto Private Cloud can guarantee high uptime, specialized security standards and disaster recovery, as well as full control over your environment as you would have on premises, often at a lower cost.

Dynamics 365 as a turnkey subscription

Dynamics 365’s subscription offering is hosted in Microsoft’s cloud and is an appealing offer to many organizations for its turnkey-like app. However, the customer is still responsible for a list of cloud management and authentication tasks. And for organizations without IT and cloud expertise, the ongoing management may mean they will require additional services. For instance, Microsoft recommends that you fill certain roles to achieve a successful Dynamics 365 deployment, including business managers, and that’s just for technical deployment. Other initiatives, such as end-user training, customization and ongoing support, should be put in place for successful adoption of the solution.

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Running a cloud-based solution such as Dynamics 365 business-wide

Dynamics 365 was designed and delivered in the cloud for unprecedented transparency, more accurate and comprehensive analytics, and new operational efficiencies, to name a few reasons. Also, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 were designed to work together, thanks to a seamless level of integration at the product and cloud platform level. For example, you can get full CRM functionality embedded into Outlook so that the user does not need to move from one application to another.

Using Microsoft Dynamics on premises or hosted

If your organization already utilizes a legacy version of Dynamics (Dynamics AX, GP, SL, NAV or CRM), you may be pondering the next best step to continue to streamline processes and maximize your investment. The good news is that your team’s familiarity with Microsoft solutions makes any learning curve shorter when moving to the new Dynamics 365. You likely already have complementary solutions, such as Office, which fuels integration and adoption. In addition, many partners offer migration packages to help customers make a smooth, cost-effective transition from their current Dynamics solution to the new platform.

There are also options for Dynamics customers that want to modernize immediately by moving their current solution to the cloud while they plan for the future. Some customers are deeply invested in customized solutions with a lot of life cycle remaining. Deploying your current solution in the cloud offers the ability to retain custom solutions and gain a longer evaluation cycle as the Dynamics marketplace continues to add industry-specific options. We support these types of initiatives by migrating current installments of Dynamics to an appropriate cloud platform, and providing customers migration services with no penalties when the time is right for them to move to Dynamics 365 eases the commitment obstacle.

Part 2: It is vital to understand your cloud options so you can make the right decision for your organization

On-premises cloud

The announcement of the Dynamics 365 on-premises version allows organizations to run and manage Dynamics 365 either on premises or in a cloud platform of your choosing. With this approach, your in-house team takes on the work, costs and risks associated with management, including hardware, software, deployment, training, updates, disaster recovery, and physical and application security. (At the time of publishing, the on-premises version of Dynamics 365 contained different features than the software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. Organizations will want to evaluate these differences before choosing this option.)

Dynamics 365 SaaS

Microsoft Azure™, Microsoft’s hyperscale cloud with a 99.5 percent uptime guarantee, is the default hosting environment for organizations that subscribe to Dynamics 365. With the subscription model from Microsoft, your in-house team or value-added reseller is responsible for supporting client connectivity, permissions, updates and quality assurance. The SaaS model shifts ongoing management and support of the cloud platform to a direct relationship between the customer and Microsoft.

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Fully managed cloud

Private and Hybrid Cloud: For organizations that want a high degree of control over the uptime, security and other technical factors, DXC Concerto Private and Hybrid Cloud can deliver additional compliance and control. Ask about industry-specific controls offered in the DXC Concerto Cloud, such as Service Organization Control (SOC), Payment Card Industry (PCI), HIPAA, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and others.

Public Cloud: For organizations already hosting their legacy Dynamics solution in the Microsoft Cloud, DXC Concerto’s management services can add performance, security and cost control to these environments.

Other digital transformation initiatives

A move to Dynamics 365 is likely only one of many digital transformation initiatives for your organization. To accomplish a holistic cloud-based solution, your organization may also need to move legacy or custom-developed solutions to the cloud. Or, your organization may want to embrace cloud-based IT for seamless management of user access, security and application delivery.

We can assist with related transformation initiatives in these ways:

• Hosting of legacy versions of Microsoft Dynamics. We have helped hundreds of Dynamics customers gain the benefits of the cloud with their current versions. And there are no penalties when moving to Dynamics 365 when the time is right.

• Hosting of third-party and custom solutions. Many Dynamics customers want to retain custom and industry-specific solutions. These can be moved to the cloud for integration, performance or reasons related to company preference.

• Cloud-based IT and virtual desktop infrastructure. DXC Concerto cloud solutions provide IT infrastructure, self-healing cloud desktops, security and delivery of all applications to your users for a seamless IT approach.

• Advisory services related to workload placement, data center transformation and application transformation.

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Part 3: Driving adoption

Even the most powerful technologies will not deliver a return on investment without strong user adoption. The good news is that using best practices for driving adoption, along with a modern and integrated solution such as Dynamics 365, can help drive seamless processes and make users happy.

Here are seven adoption tips from our experts:

1. Make sure migrating makes sense.

Your users need to understand how Dynamics 365 will improve their work lives. Engaging and listening to team members from the beginning of the evaluation process will help your deployment be designed and aligned with their business use cases in mind. Communicate the benefits to users, as well as the timing and details of your deployment strategy. Give them the opportunity to ask questions along the way.

2. Get (and keep) executive buy-in.

Your leadership needs to drive a Dynamics 365 adoption program to ensure that your employees embrace this new technology. Communication about your program should come from the highest level of leadership, and managers/directors should be held accountable for ensuring that employees complete testing and training in a timely manner.

3. Focus on the users, not the product.

User-centric projects with a strong adoption program are proven to drive twice the usage. It is a common mistake to become so immersed in the technical details of the deployment, bells and whistles, that the users are an afterthought. If your organization needs resources for an adoption program, ask your partner for assistance or evaluate change-management services.

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4. Take it one app at a time.

Dynamics 365 is very scalable. You can start with one Dynamics 365 app and go from there — just as you might with an Office 365 service such as Skype. This pilot/test-and-go approach allows your organization to drive business transformation with Dynamics in one area of the business and build on that success.

5. Examine uptime and disaster recovery policies.

Microsoft’s guaranteed uptime for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is 99.5 percent. Its availability also allows for planned downtime that occurs once a month and last no longer than 8 hours. This high availability will satisfy the needs of a majority of organizations. A typical 99.5 percent SLA allows for 3.6 total hours of downtime a month, or 1.83 days in a year.

However, there are a few organizations whose unique operations (for example: 24-hour e-commerce solutions) dramatically affect revenue with downtime or maintenance windows. These situations call for an examination of multisite replication and failover options, along with a process or service to automate the recovery and cutover to another data center should your application be affected.

Microsoft recently released Azure to Azure ASR to general availability, which allows VMs, services, networks and supporting services to be brought up on demand within Azure if required, even across regions. It also simplifies the testing of disaster recovery through its “run book,” such as pre-checks and tests. Multiregional deployments require some specialized deployment methods. An organization should examine these requirements with Microsoft or a cloud services provider to reduce risk of disruption.

6. Provide ample training and support.

People can become frustrated when they aren’t familiar and productive with their solutions — especially when up against a deadline. The worst-case scenario is that your team creates workarounds and resistance to adopting the new solution. Make sure your team has ample opportunity to try out the platform and understand key business processes before your go-live date.

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7. Don’t assume your organization is compliant.

Regulatory compliance with Dynamics 365 is possible with all of your cloud options — but it’s not automatic. Work with governance, risk and compliance (GRC) experts to ensure that you maintain a solid security standing, minimize your organizational risk, and get the documentation you need throughout the migration process and beyond. These experts can help you design security processes that deal with data encryption and flow, implementing security throughout the application and hardware layers, additional penetration testing, configuration, monitoring and more.

Why DXC Concerto?

DXC Concerto, the mid-market cloud offering within DXC Technology, specializes in providing a best-in-class multi-cloud platform that helps organizations accelerate digital transformation and realize their full potential. We make cloud adoption easy with unrivaled uptime and accelerated delivery, worldwide. Our strategic partnerships include Microsoft, NetApp, Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Delivering application expertise, innovation and service excellence in every engagement, we serve as trusted advisors to clients and application partners seeking to better manage risk and reduce operational challenges.

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, serving nearly 6,000 private and public-sector clients from a diverse array of industries across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network deliver transformative digital offerings and solutions that help clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. ECL-097. October 2018