7 Benefits of Migrating On-Premise Dynamics CRM to the Cloud

Is Your Old On-Site CRM Holding Back Your Business?

Many companies invested heavily in on-site Dynamics CRM systems years ago, gaining deep custom features and unlocking advantages.

However, over time, gaps emerged as Microsoft accelerated cloud innovation exclusively into Dynamics 365 online.

Your customized, self-managed CRM may meet current business needs. But it lacks agility, smarts, and scalability powering modern sales models thriving on digital speed, predictive insights, and rapid testing.

So when’s the right time to migrate legacy on-site CRM into the Azure cloud unlocking next-gen capabilities?

Let’s explore 7 key benefits showing whether undertaking this change brings real business value worth the effort, risk, and temporary disruption.

• Speeding Innovation

Microsoft rolls out new Dynamics 365 features much faster on the cloud – leaving on-site versions lagging on sales, service, marketing, and analytics.

Cloud subscribers get quarterly innovations like AI insights, voice/chat channels, virtual assistant coaching, customer data connections, journey builders, and expanded reporting – all unavailable to locally installed users.

This forces tough choices for companies to either sink costs mimicking cloud innovations on local servers or shift to cloud access to stay leading edge.

Migration ends this constant catch-up chase freeing resources for higher value tasks than platform maintenance.

Teams immediately gain hundreds of cutting-edge capabilities accelerating digital efforts previously gated by version upgrade projects.

The flexible architecture also encourages innovating on customer engagement frontiers like usage-based services leveraging IoT data, and personalized policy offers to integrate predictive models or automated claims leveraging computer vision and NLP.

Cloud removes self-imposed local ceilings stifling progress for years – unlocking advanced capabilities and modernizing experiences faster through leading Dynamics innovation instantly available.

The cloud foundation lets developers introduce innovations on flexible platforms much quicker through standard tools instead of constrained custom plug-ins – speeding the delivery of new experiences users want.

Automated updates roll out new features instantly without delays coordinating local testing and patches avoiding version upgrade headaches locking functionality back in time.

Teams gain freedom by innovating ahead of market shifts rather than fighting technology just to maintain the status quo.

Moving to the cloud frees up resources, empowering them to focus on higher-value tasks.

With hundreds of advanced capabilities instantly available, digital efforts accelerate, propelling businesses forward in the competitive landscape.

• Boosting IT Productivity

On-site Dynamics CRM Integration needs extensive care managing infrastructure, licenses, versions, custom solutions, regressions, and changes locally to avoid business disruption.

Microsoft Azure Cloud massively cuts this administrative burden by offloading infrastructure, providing cost transparency, and offering automated insights detecting early performance/change risks.

IT leadership no longer struggles with on-site app infrastructure.

Painstaking upgrade planning, server/storage management, patching, and continuity testing disappear as the cloud provider handles this commodity work behind the scenes. Staff pivots to more strategic innovation projects differentiating through technology.

On the savings side, real subscription-based billing aligns costs directly to the platform value generated – fluctuating dynamically with business demand and usage.

Scalability accommodates surges without overprovisioning while avoiding underused servers still incurring expenses. This delicate balancing act, manually tuned on-site, is massively easier letting the cloud scale itself.

Lastly, automated telemetry detecting platform patterns, customization complexities, integration usage, and test deficiencies provide continuous improvement opportunities – unavailable historically and now actionable through data.

Together this cloud lift drastically reduces IT toil imposed by legacy platforms, better positioning technical teams to deliver capabilities matching modern digital customer expectations.

Ongoing optimization ensures resources stay allocated to the highest priority capability gaps generating business value vs. undifferentiated infrastructure distractions.

Lean operations sustain as teams stay focused on migrating capabilities incrementally without disruption rather than attempting risky overnight “big bang” projects swapping old for new.

• Securing Data and Compliance

On-site environments often lack the latest security enforcing compliance, defending against attacks, and preventing breaches – limiting operational flexibility.

Azure-based Dynamics 365 bakes-in tools upholding access controls, detecting threats early, and safeguarding data automatically – easing adoption even for regulated industries.

Tactics span multi-factor login, single sign-on, permission policies, and security groups maximizing access while minimizing risk. Ongoing penetration testing uncovers potential vulnerabilities to address.

Extensive activity logs support forensics and audits tracking customization changes, permission adjustments, and external data connections.

Pervasive encryption applied automatically resolves on-site protection gaps, unable to externally support such controls historically.

Additional automation enforces data sovereignty, the ability to restrict/wipe datasets, and implements redaction/masking for strict governance needs.

Centralized retention rules persist or dispose of system system-generated records aligned to legal needs.

This automation lifts significant liability off local IT struggling to uphold rigorous controls through inherent on-site limitations that stifled some regulated industry CRM adoption.

Cloud migration lifts this barrier through native compliance tools difficult to justify standalone otherwise.

Unified audit/activity tracking provides controls and visibility consolidating previously separate policy enforcement components into holistic frameworks.

• Expanding Capacity Seamlessly

Successful on-site apps often outgrow initial server and storage provisions requiring painful upgrade projects.

Azure cloud adoption alleviates constant capacity concerns through auto-scaling (“elasticity”) dynamically allocating resources matching demand spikes from surging departmental usage, new adoption, or performance lags.

This sustainably scales Dynamics avoiding disruption that commonly stalled legacy CRM lacking spare capacity.

Elastic pools automatically spin up buffer servers handling variable load periods like policy renewal rushes at the beginning/end of cycles.

Extra storage gets added to manage spikes from campaign lead list loading.

Memory prioritization steers capacity towards the busiest processes first during contention. And redundancy guarantees uptime despite underlying infrastructure changes.

Together this automation ensures Dynamics consistently scales meeting needs efficiently – impossible to accurately forecast with on-site infrastructure.

The business can stay focused on delivering value vs constantly worrying whether foundational CRM keeps up with success and process modernization.

Cloud migration lifts this inhibitor so technology never artificially constrains business performance.

Elastic pools also enable catering capacity for more advanced usage dynamics like isolating production workloads separately from development, test, and training environments for staff.

This keeps non-essential test transactions from interfering with core customer-impacting functionality.

Some organizations even leverage differential capacity templates matching load profiles across less intense internal self-service use cases vs. capacity-centric cases like AI model training.

Whatever the need, cloud migration lifts fixed design constraints limiting support for shifting priorities over long horizons.

• Activating AI & Advanced Analytics

While technically possible to add machine learning on-site, cloud-scale unlocks operationalizing predictive models, customer insights, and prescriptive guidance conveying a massive competitive advantage.

Latency risks, data silos, infrastructure barriers, and disruption aversion historically stopped advanced analytics from permeating CRM execution focused purely on accurate transaction processing.

Cloud-powered AI tools like sentiment analysis, product usage predictors, next-best-action recommenders, and optimal channel assist functionality embed intelligence directly into staff tools, workflows, and processes – augmenting human judgment with data.

This elevates experiences, improves outcomes, and drives efficiencies impossible for on-site deployments to support prematurely.

The volume, variety, frequency, and granularity of data required to fuel accurate analytics exceed realistic on-site capacities.

Cross-organization data consolidation, external signals, and algorithms leveraging thousands of enterprise datasets are enabled by a cloud data warehouse fully managed on Azure – making insights easily consumable by Dynamics.

This keeps focus on enhancing models rather than battling IT constraints or internal data sharing limitations stifling progress.

Advanced capabilities permeate operations as a byproduct of migration.

Once validated, operationalized models interface directly with staff workflows prescribing next-best actions across customer scenarios.

Agents get risk scoring and coverage recommendations as they quote policies using model guidance.

Health history analysis recommends ideal wellness incentives customized to projected conditions optimizing retention at renewal.

Claims managers receive automated fraud likelihood scoring streamlining approvals.

This augmented intelligence reaches all facets of operations without added disruption simply leveraging cloud scale unavailable historically.

Cloud-powered AI tools embed intelligence directly into staff tools, workflows, and processes, elevating experiences and driving efficiencies previously impossible.

• Consolidating Administration

While Dynamics 365 online modernizes the front-end user CRM interface, consolidated cloud administration ecosystems unlock equal back-end productivity lift after migration.

Unified security, identity management, workflow approvals, external collaborations, change control reviews, and cross-app integrations all connect natively on Azure – easing IT management workload and reducing compliance risks.

Through centralized Azure Active Directory, access rules and permissions get consistently applied across applications with cleaner organization.

Common data entities reduce redundancy by mapping similar concepts between apps. And unified Power Platform enables business teams to build custom applications, workflows, analytics dashboards, and chatbots accessible across Azure properties including Dynamics – with shared governance guardrails.

The alternative of supporting these numerous administrative facets disjointedly with separate on-site tools drastically complicates adding capabilities, risks consistency gaps introducing risks, and inhibits collaboration across siloed systems.

Migrating to Dynamics 365 online untangles these dependencies – allowing fuller business contribution.

Redundant integration needs also decrease substantially with unified identity and data models.

Historic on-premise trial and error efforts propagating look-ups, synchronizing security changes, and marshaling data across products using disjointed protocols give way to seamless configuration through common Azure tools applied across the Dynamics ecosystem natively.

Teams focus innovation on what’s possible with deeper connectivity vs. constant struggles implementing foundational plumbing to enable basic unified experiences.

Cloud migration untangles dependencies and decreases redundant integration efforts, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than struggling with foundational technicalities.

• Expanding Geographically

Pursuing new market opportunities abroad faces infrastructure and IT blocks through cloud accessibility unlocking global Dynamics capabilities faster minus localized servers.

Microsoft’s worldwide data center footprint provides native compliance advantages on-site setups lack – including in-country disaster recovery and data sovereignty control upholding regional regulations.

This allows focusing fully on configuring appropriate currencies, languages, taxation schemes, and country-specific adjustments to launch quickly on the cloud.

Spin up additional non-production instances integrated to copy production data, allowing teams to securely test market differences before enforcing changes. This agility gets inhibited trying to stretch limited on-site resources to cover domestic responsibilities while tackling incremental global opportunities.

Cloud also avoids large upfront overseas capital investments until regional market viability proves out through in-country subscription models.

As coverage expands, access enforcement stays consistent natively through unified identity and permissions applied across instances.

This better aligns international CRM maturity to meet modern global digital business needs impossible to piece together on-site.

Lastly, global teams coordinate updates seamlessly through unified change tracking and deployment services native to Dynamics 365 online.

Locally deployed systems faced gaps keeping country instances perfectly in sync needing supplementary tools or complex orchestration aligning code pushes.

Cloud agility allows teams to spin up additional instances for testing market differences securely.

This flexibility streamlines international expansion without upfront overseas capital investments.

Unified change tracking and deployment services simplify global coordination, reducing complexities historically associated with managing diverse on-premise systems across regions.

Does your organization face similar limitations imposed by legacy platforms that hamper growth? What other challenges arise when attempting to sustain customized systems long-term as technical debt accumulates?

Does a shift to Microsoft’s cloud-based Dynamics 365 platform make sense considering your team’s needs and capabilities?

What future priorities factor into your thinking on system modernization plans?

We would love to hear your perspectives on balancing the tradeoffs and securing CRM solutions over the long term.