While Business Central is a cloud-first service, customers who need to run their workloads on-premises or on the intelligent edge connected to the cloud can now do so. With Business Central, once customers sign up for the service in the cloud, they have the option to deploy it locally to their choice of hardware. While they are running Business Central on their own hardware, customers will have a tenant in the cloud, and the data from the customers’ hardware will be replicated to the cloud for intelligent cloud scenarios. At all times, customers are informed of their “cloud ready” status, so when they’re ready to transition completely to the cloud, it’s a simple step.
The customer data is always uploaded to the cloud from on-premises (customers can opt out if desired) to bring the intelligent cloud capabilities to the Business Central deployments on the intelligent edge. Business Central will be licensed through CSP, at the same price, regardless of where the customer (through a partner) deploys their solution.
Partners are still able to customize on-premises solutions through code customization. However, doing that may degrade their replication services, because increasing the number of code customizations reduces the percentage of tables that can be replicated to the cloud. At all times, customers will see a tile showing the replication percentage and a list of the tables with issues so they can work with their VAR to determine the appropriate resolution steps. This is an important way for customers to continue receiving value from the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge, regardless of the changes made to Business Central on-premises.
The decision to move applications and services should be based on business value, and a hybrid cloud model creates a platform allowing our customers to make that decision. One common questions, customers has that where to start or, more importantly, how to maintain momentum. Our STRIDE approach, make the process easy and transparent for customer and end user.