Microsoft Dynamics AX to D365 Upgrade Journeys, Part 4: Hybrid model considerations

Editor's Note: This article coincides with part 4 of our new podcast series on AX to D365FO upgrades.

One of the great proposal qualifying statements that I have ever read was buried deep in an upgrade proposal for a large multi-national manufacturing company. If you did not know what you were looking for you would have completely missed it, and yet it was the crucial technical item that was going to determine success or failure for the Microsoft Dynamics AX to D365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) cloud upgrade project.

And I quote:

“System response time is guaranteed between data centers”.

Translation: Critical ERP data for your implementation is guaranteed to move speedily and effectively between high tech data centers connected by the latest and greatest fiber optics and there will be no Netflix-style video buffering issues.

So far so good.

But what about data that must move to and from that manufacturing plant in rural China that does not have the latest and greatest internet connectivity?

Or, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, let's say that plant and all others scattered around the globe do have modern high-speed internet connectivity so that there are no latency issues between plants and the servers in the data centers and everyone is able to work on their cloud-based ERP solution with acceptable speed.

What happens when the we must communicate with the data collection device located in the warehouse to record a real time inventory transaction? Now every connection must be state of the ...