Today, around 56% of companies worldwide use Microsoft Azure for their cloud services and the platform has experienced 30% year-over-year growth. “Microsoft is the only company investing in the [pure-cloud infrastructure] needed around the world to run our products for our [customers],” says Mike Ehrenberg, Chief Technology Officer for Dynamics 365 Applications at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s suite of business tools are built on a single, consistent architecture and model, so businesses that use the company’s ERP Business Central can easily access features like Copilot, Power Platform, Teams, etc. and use them in a fully integrated way. But in order to reap the full benefits of Microsoft’s innovations, Ehrenberg underlines the importance of moving to the cloud: 

“The most important thing is that the cloud versions allow this process of continuous innovation where every time we deliver a new capability…[businesses] just get it. They don’t have to do a big upgrade anymore; they don’t have to take downtime. It’s just a dramatic change from the way these systems have been managed in the past.” 

Let’s look at how Microsoft continues to revolutionize operations in the cloud for Business Central Online users. 

Microsoft is continuously making improvements to reduce the risk of outages for businesses operating in the cloud, such as one of the latest innovations: Availability Zone Redundancy. 

What is Availability Zone Redundancy? 

Many Azure regions are divided into multiple data centers within a single region, so each zone has separate power, network, and cooling systems. This segregation ensures that an issue in one zone does not affect the others, significantly reducing the risk of outages. 

How does Availability Zone Redundancy help businesses to stay operational? 

With Availability Zone Redundancy, data is copied synchronously across zones, and resources are distributed, allowing the software to run uninterrupted even in the event of a zone failure. For instance, during an outage in ones of the Australian zones, none of the 1,000 Business Central users in that zone experienced a disruption to their business. This level of reliability and resilience would be unattainable in traditional on-premises environments. The continuous effort by Microsoft to enhance resilience ensures businesses remain operational under various conditions, providing a robust and dependable cloud infrastructure. In fact, Microsoft still maintains a global uptime of 99.9%. 

Microsoft was named a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services. Over 53,000 organizations use Azure AI to streamline operations, gain insights, and drive innovation. By  embedding AI capabilities directly into Azure, Microsoft allows businesses to build intelligent applications that can analyze data, predict outcomes, and automate processes, all within the same environment.

Azure AI Platform includes 1,600 large language, small language, and vision models that organizations can use to develop, train, and deploy models at scale and tailor them specifically for their business needs. For example, a supermarket chain running on Business Central online could use AI in Azure to develop demand forecasting tools to help reduce waste in each of their stores.

As AI becomes more prevalent, ensuring security in an online environment is essential to keeping AI applications protected throughout their lifecycle. As of recently, Microsoft has become the first security provider to offer end-to-end security posture management, threat protection, data security, and governance for AI. 

Tools like Azure Security Center and Microsoft Defender provide businesses with proactive threat intelligence, adaptive security measures, and comprehensive risk management through AI. AI technologies can analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, identifying patterns and anomalies that could indicate potential security threats. By continuously learning from this data, AI can predict and preemptively respond to cyberattacks, often before they can cause harm. 

But that’s not all. When you use Azure, you can easily take advantage of all of Microsoft’s built-in security features while ensuring your business gets access to the latest protections and updates. This means businesses don’t have to worry about maintaining their own security teams as Microsoft takes care of it with 24/7 monitoring and consistent improvements. 

Businesses that have decided to wait to move to the cloud  risk missing out on the latest developments in cloud security, AI, and more. When you use LS Central, which is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and available as Software as a Service (SaaS), you can take advantage of the innovative services available in the Microsoft Azure cloud, such as Power BI. Get in touch with our experts to learn how to get the latest features and prepare your business for tomorrow’s innovations, today. 

By www.lsretail.com