Finance + Operations On-premises and Cloud-based Finance and Operations Apps
You can deploy finance and operations apps in the cloud, or Finance + Operations (on-premises). As a developer, it is important for you to understand the difference between these architectures.
Cloud architecture
Cloud deployments offer a service that is fully managed by Microsoft. Cloud architecture has several benefits, including significantly shorter implementation, fewer required customizations, and a significantly reduced cost for IT infrastructure.
Cloud deployments allow customers to stay current in a consistent, predictable, and seamless manner. This cadence, which allows continuous updates of the application, aims to lower upgrade costs, provide everyone access to the latest capabilities, improve performance, and offer a better support experience.
The architecture for cloud deployment includes several main components:
- Subscription – A subscription to finance and operations apps gives you an online cloud environment.
- Licenses – Customers must purchase subscription licenses (SLs) for their organization or for their affiliates’ employees and on-site agents, vendors, or contractors who directly or indirectly access finance and operations apps.
- Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) – Azure AD is the multi-tenant, cloud-based directory and identity management service from Microsoft that combines core directory services, application access management, and identity protection in a single solution.
- Tenant – In Azure AD, a tenant represents an organization.
- Microsoft 365 Admin help center – A subscription management portal that Microsoft 365 provides for administrators.
- Lifecycle Services – Is a collaboration portal that provides an environment and a set of regularly updated services that can help you manage the application lifecycle of your finance and operations implementations.
- Azure DevOps – Used primarily for code version control and to deploy a build environment.
On-premises architecture
It is important to remember that because an on-premises deployment is locally deployed, system requirements, hardware sizing, and functionality of the application differs from cloud deployments.
Identical to a cloud deployment, Lifecycle Services is used to manage the on-premises deployment. To build and manage an enterprise-class, high-scale application, on-premises deployments use Microsoft Azure Server Service standalone clusters. The Service Fabric standalone clusters can be installed on any machine that is running Windows Server. There are two types of clusters: one for sandboxes and one for production environments. Application Object Servers (AOS), Financial Reports Designer (formally named Management Reporter), and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) are roles that are deployed in both the production and sandbox clusters.
When deciding which type of deployment your organization should use, you should consider the overall approach of the implementation and the management of the infrastructure. Additional considerations include the organizational preferences to meet regulatory and compliance needs of the business. With a cloud deployment, the structure is completely managed by Microsoft. With an on-premises deployment, the customer takes on more responsibility and has additional costs. Examples of additional costs could include standing up your own infrastructure, configuring a high-availability disaster recovery solution, standing up sandbox environments, and managing the infrastructure.
