Which comes first, the cloud migration or the upgrade?

More organizations are migrating their existing on-premise solutions to the cloud than ever before. They've received good value from commodity cloud services like email and collaboration and now see a pathway to get out of the datacenter business. They want to put as much as possible into the cloud, and they want their cloud service provider to handle the maintenance tasks, so they can focus their time on being more aligned with the business. As part of these transitions to the cloud, organizations are also evaluating if it's a good time to upgrade to the latest versions of their applications. 

For some solutions, a transition to the cloud is a great time to upgrade, but for more complex workloads like ERP or CRM it may not be the right decision. In order to determine whether a migration or upgrade should come first, or rather together, it is important to ask a few key questions.

Is it too much change at once for your users?

We all know that most people don't respond well to big changes. When you alter the way users access their applications along with the look and feel of the app, you may be introducing too much change and therefore disrupt business processes.

It is critical that your cloud migration have executive level buy in that trickles down to your user base. Users notice delays or small differences and can be very vocal, unless they have buy in. We have found that for most Microsoft Dynamics deployments, it's best to perform upgrades in phases. Migrate the workloads to the cloud as they exist today, then stage out the upgrade when it is most convenient for your organization.  The migration can be accomplished in several ways.  One ...