4 thoughts on “Dynamics 365 for Operations Cloud Vs OnPremise November 2017 Comparison”

1. 

   Kris Weiskittel says:

   Brandon,

   Thanks for this comparison. I’m curious how you would explain the “Microsoft Help” and “Real time issue resolution” categories… I find it interesting the Cloud option wins the MS Help category, yet OnPrem wins the Real-time issue category. I tend to view the two categories as one if you will.

   Kris

   November 30, 2017 at 3:54 pm
   • 

     Brandon Ahmad says:

     Beautiful Question. That was a tough one. As of now, the Microsoft help for On-Prem is bad. Microsoft has made it quite clear to a number of companies that they are cloud first, and that On-Prem support is the second priority, like frequently telling paying customers that their problems are because they want to go on premise. So, Microsoft help is very shaky as of now which is why I rated it so bad for On-Prem.

     But an On-Prem does offer one key advantage over the microsoft cloud. In the Azure cloud model, a customer is sharing the support staff or paying a very high amount of money for a dedicated resource. In On-Prem, someone internal or external, has the ability to fix many of the real day to day issues and learn about the implementation (possibly through years with a company) intimately, which helps resolution speed. Plus, many of the lockdowns, such as SQL troubleshooting tools, in the cloud version are not there, which gives an implementation a tremendous advantage in choosing quality of service providers.

     This isn’t just a challenge with Dynamics 365, however. It’s well known that companies who’ve invested in specialized long-term service often have losses of quality when going to a shared model of service delivery.

     Hopefully, this explains the basis for my rating. I took into account that most onprem companies have dedicated staff or small providers that handle production.

     November 30, 2017 at 4:25 pm
     • 

       Kris Weiskittel says:

       Thanks Brandon.

       I think one of my biggest concerns with the Cloud/Azure model is the lack of back-end access, which I personally use quite often for troubleshooting (I’m sure you can relate). I would also miss the ability to use more traditional tools, such as T-SQL, to directly query the DAX database for things like Data Warehousing and Integrations. Clearly there are other tools, newer ones, that can replace T-SQL etc; but so many DAX experts have decades of experience with the traditional tool set. I like how the traditional tools seem to use less overhead and provide for more of a “not Dynamics oriented” solution set. For some reason I like having solutions that don’t rely on MSFT directly or something in Dynamics (other than the data itself).

       My #1 concern with the Cloud/Azure option is having to rely on MSFT for support, troubleshooting and timely resolution for various issues that come up each day. I’m truly worried about the customer/user experience in that regard.

       November 30, 2017 at 5:16 pm
       • 

         Brandon Ahmad says:

         You aren’t alone Kris. That’s been the main concern of every organization that I’ve talked with who has made an extensive investment in the skillsets of the staff or infrastructure to maintain certain levels of service, and Microsoft has had a lot of trouble with convincing them that the cloud experience would equivocate.

         Oddly enough, Microsoft sponsored a very famous paper saying that security, not loss of skill, uptime, or costs/roi was the top concern in going to the cloud. My experience seems to be different. Check out Figure 19 of the paper.

         The Economics of the Cloud Microsoft White Paper

         Very interesting..

         November 30, 2017 at 7:17 pm

Comments are closed.