Azure for your Business Central: the cloud that runs your ERP

It depends on your subscription. Business Central Online already runs on Microsoft's infrastructure and you don't need to manage servers for the ERP itself. But in practice, almost no company sticks to just the ERP: if you need a test environment to validate changes before applying them to production, servers for custom applications running outside the ERP, your own backups on top of Microsoft's, or to connect systems that aren't part of Business Central, those resources are managed separately in Azure. It's also common to use Azure to centralise email, shared files or third-party applications your company needs besides the ERP, all under the same infrastructure and the same security as the rest of your Microsoft ecosystem.

Yes, that's one of the most common uses: we migrate your servers and applications to Azure so you stop depending on your own hardware and its upkeep, with the same or better availability and without the upfront investment that renewing physical equipment involves. The process starts by analysing what you have today (servers, applications, dependencies between them) to plan the migration with no surprises and without stopping your business during the transition. Once on Azure, you stop worrying about ageing hardware, failing disks or the server room that needs air conditioning: Microsoft manages the physical infrastructure and you only worry about your application and your data. What's more, if you need more capacity later on — for example, during a one-off high-traffic campaign — you can scale resources instantly, something that with your own hardware would mean buying new equipment weeks in advance.

We set up automatic backups in Azure, with the frequency and retention period you need depending on how critical each system is: you might want a daily backup of your Business Central and a weekly one for other, less critical data, for example. What matters isn't just generating the backup, but knowing it actually works: we test them periodically by restoring them in a test environment, to make sure they work when you really need them, not just that they show up as "completed" in a list. This is something many companies discover too late: they had backups configured, but had never tested them, and when they really needed them they couldn't be restored properly. With Azure, backups are also stored geographically separate from where your system runs, so a physical problem at one data centre doesn't leave you without both at once.

You pay for what you use, with no upfront investment in hardware or perpetual server licences. The cost depends on the resources you need (processing power, storage, backups, bandwidth), and can be scaled up or down as your needs change, something impossible with a physical server bought for the next five years. We help you size the resources by analysing your real operations — how many users, what data volume, what usage peaks you have — so the cost is predictable from the start and you don't end up paying for oversized infrastructure "just in case", nor, conversely, falling short and facing performance problems. We periodically review actual usage to spot resources that are no longer needed and can be scaled back, so spending stays fitted over time, not just in the first month.

Yes. It's common to centralise in Azure both the resources Business Central needs around it (test environments, integrations, backups) and other applications, portals or custom development your company uses besides the ERP, all under the same infrastructure and the same security. This has a practical advantage: instead of having each application with a different provider, with its own credentials, its own backups and its own access rules, everything sits under a single control panel and a single security policy, which simplifies management and reduces the risk of something being left unprotected by oversight. It also makes it easier for different applications to communicate securely within the same virtual network, instead of exposing data over the open internet just so two systems can talk to each other.