Partner perspective: Why we are urging our on-premises Dynamics NAV customers to the cloud

The benefits of moving to the cloud are becoming increasingly evident as more and more organizations strive to automate business processes. A move to the cloud not only makes life easier for people, but it’s also much more affordable for businesses. In this article I’ll look at some of the challenges with on-premises solutions and tell you why our firm, Catapult, is pushing customers to the cloud.

Top 3 customer challenges I’ve experience with on-premises

Interoperability 

The thing about an on-premises solution is that it doesn’t keep up with the times. It's static. If you have a new version of Microsoft Windows or Office coming out, you must consider how your on-premises Dynamics NAV solution will work with the upgrade. Something as simple as an Office update can spur you to think about whether your NAV ERP system is still going to work with it or not. 

We have had many conversations with clients about this very topic. Office updates can break the ability for NAV to send things to Excel, and piecemeal customizations stop working because the product hasn’t been tweaked or optimized for, say, Office 365 or Windows 10.

Further problems can occur as a result of updates, such as printing and previewing reports. Historically, people have had to pay to do a platform or application update on the NAV side, which can be a big cost due to effort around three-way code merges and QA. Or they have had to run unsupported legacy operating systems, such as Windows 7 or XP, on stand-alone virtual or physical machines.

Imagine if you were to perform a large-scale renovation on your home but not update your electrical or your plumbing. You might get a fancy shower system in place, but the water pressure ends up being way too low because your overall plumbing is garbage. It will still work but with weird or inconsistent performance, and it won’t be optimized. I like to use this analogy as it’s the most parallel in my mind. 

One of the biggest concerns my customers express is the added work on bug fixes and patch updates. Westquip Diesel Sales, an industrial engine distributor and assembly facility, are a previously on-premises NAV user. They faced the challenge of staying up to date with hotfixes and patches to ensure stability and security. By moving to Dynamics 365 Business Central, they were able to leave behind the constant cumulative updates efforts while still running a system they can trust. 

Sluggish

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