Demystifying the Cloud: Microsoft Urges Dynamics ERP Users to Examine the Risks, Costs of On-Premise Hosting

What would it take to keep your business-critical servers running in a disaster?  Are you ready to haul buckets of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs for days on end when your backup power is knocked out by flooding?  How about two flights?

When companies are evaluating whether to move their business processes to the cloud, they often believe one of the key considerations is cost, but Microsoft thinks businesses should take a broader view and spend some time thinking about how they will handle a range of challenges like uptime, backups, and worst case scenarios.

"A lot of companies look at the cost of running a server in their back room and their trying to compare that with the cost of a data center," said Dan Youngers, Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partner Technology Advisor in a webinar about demystifying the cloud for members of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV, AX and GP user groups.

But that's not the way to view it, Youngers believes.

"That's an apples to oranges comparison," he said. "What you really want to do is compare apples to apples, which is ‘what is it going to take for me to have redundant Internet lines here that attach to this server, so if one goes down there's absolutely no impact to my employees or to my customers or vendors. If there's a power outage do I have back up diesel generators that can run for days? Who's maintaining that? If you have a fire do you have a really good fire environment where there's a lot of fire retardant-type stuff to put out fires before they spread throughout your building?"

Youngers said companies have to think about what ...