What Does It Cost for Microsoft Dynamics in the Cloud?

Editor's Notes

• #7: Talk about the Types of clouds To date MSFT hasn’t released a ready made solution like say QB online for Dynamics Options are IaaS solutions on Azure, AWS, Cloud Service Provider
• #8: Geoffrey Moore, the author of Crossing the Chasm, does a good Job of explaining what workloads are appropriate for public vs private clouds. He breaks workloads down into two categories, systems of record, and systems of engagement. Systems of record are organized around data, systems of engagement are organized around the end user experience. Systems of record must be secure, and accurate. Systems of engagement must be charming, and easy to use. Systems of records are applications that are meant for private cloud solutions.
• #10: How mission-critical an application is to your organization will determine the level of availability you'll want associated with a workload. The sad truth is that many companies believe they can go hours, days, or weeks without key business systems. That is, until they experience their first major outage of that system. For example, the difference between a 99.9% and a 99.99% SLA is 39 minutes 26 seconds of downtime per month. With a production halt and impact to your customers - this timeframe becomes overwhelming, and not to be repeated.
• #11: Many people mistakenly believe that because their solution is "in the cloud," everything is backed up from their locations, whether that be one location or sites all over the world. Unfortunately, many cloud providers don't include site resiliency or geographic redundancy in their base offerings. These are considered add-on features, which often increase the price of a cloud deployment - even though this represents a critical piece of a cloud solution.
• #12: Often a concern with public cloud solutions is available bandwidth. This is typically a metered connection and customers have an unpredictable spend, as they aren't sure how much bandwidth they'll need at any one point in time. This can be especially true for organizations running seasonal solutions in the cloud. In contrast, some private cloud providers will include elasticity in their planned costs to accommodate bandwidth usage.
• #13: The ability to support traditional application workloads in a cloud environment still requires compliance around core licenses to run the platform. Whether you are thinking about a CRM, Accounting, or Content Management solution, the true cost becomes not just the consumption pricing, but the underlying licenses and potential session virtualization technologies that are required to deliver the workloads.
• #14: Finally, there is a price that some industry analysts want to ignore. Behind these cloud services there is still a physical server- in some cases thousands. Cloud Service Providers must acquire and manage large amounts of complex infrastructure to support your workloads.  All this infrastructure has to live in a datacenter that requires the highest of availability of services like power, cooling, and bandwidth.
• #16: typical GP customer. This model can easily be interchanged between GP, NAV, and SL. In this scenario our customer has 10 named GP users and they are migrating from GP 2010 to 2013. We’ll change things up a bit and plan on this customer having kept their maintenance up to date, and leveraging those licenses for their cloud environment. They will however still need to obtain office and RDS licenses either independently or via their cloud provider. This environment will consist of an RDS server, a SQL database server and if you’re deploying the GP web client, an additional IIS server. Following best practices this deployment will also have a dedicated test environment. For this scenario our company doesn’t currently run Dynamics AX so we’re going to compare the on premise deployment to a SaaS model in the cloud. If the company did own their own licenses we could leverage them in the cloud as well to reduce the monthly cloud fees.