The Cloud Question for Microsoft Dynamics

I attended Convergence 2015 as a Microsoft Dynamics GP customer, but I was also invited to participate in two GPUG (Great Plains User Group) sponsored sessions where the audience can ask questions to a panel of users – me being one of them.

This is not my first time on a panel at Convergence, however this year an interesting question was posed to us during one of our sessions that I think is one that most companies either have or will struggle with.  The question was “Can you tell us how and what your companies think about Dynamics hosted in the cloud?”

First off, it is a very good question but it will get as many different answers as there are people in the room.  My answer was something like this:

Having data or programs hosted has been brought up by different people over the years but we have rigid views of our data – our data should be in our house.  Now while that has been and still remains our policy, we have eased that thinking somewhat depending on what data we are actually talking about. My organization is looking at Power BI, and it’s true that Power BI is hosted and you create connections into your data.  So yes, we are talking about exposing sales data.  The difference I see between this and a completely hosted system is that in a hosted system we are dependent on someone else’s system and network for security while in an on premise solution we are responsible for our own.  So maybe that’s really our answer – if we have a breach, it is our fault whereas a hosted environment would be someone else’s fault.

While there is no set answer and each company will evaluate cloud solutions differently, this is a question that deserves a lot of discussion so that all parties truly understand what is at stake and what the risks are. A thorough discussion and evaluation within your organization is needed to truly answer that question.