Microsoft Certifies Dynamics CRM On-Prem Running on Azure IaaS

Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando that it is adding a self-hosted option for customers by delivering certification for Dynamics CRM on-premises running in a Microsoft Azure environment. Now customers will be able to run Dynamics CRM on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS) with Azure Premium Storage for production workloads.

Microsoft's Bob Stutz wrote on the Dynamics blog that "Businesses are moving to the cloud at an increasingly rapid pace," with CRM Online revenue nearly doubling in the last quarter. "One of our strengths at Microsoft has been our ability to support organizations in their journey to the cloud, giving them choice and options on cloud deployment -- whether it be public cloud, partner hosted, or a self-hosted option."

Microsoft pledges to make Azure hosting easy, with customers just "a single click away from being deployed in the cloud." Microsoft had already promised to offer streamlined deployment of Dynamics CRM through Lifecycle Services (LCS), its cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) utility that has so far been used only by Dynamics AX.  Using LCS, customers will be able to deploy CRM on IaaS directly into their Azure subscription. The use of LCS has the obvious benefit of streamlining deployments and incorporating some of the new tools that Microsoft started showing of this week at WPC like new and improved data import tools.

Customers already licensed on Dynamics CRM and running it on premise can use their licenses to run their CRM instances on Azure. This, says Stutz, is a tremendous advantage for customers who want to move to cloud computing but are unable to deploy a complete SaaS based solution like CRM ...