Microsoft Dynamics AX/365 Services

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Disaster Recovery

Each Finance and Operations standard cloud offer includes three environments:

Tier-1 Environment: Develop & Test

One develop/test instance is provided for the duration of the subscription. This instance is a non-production single-box instance that the customer can use an as automated build environment, or to customize Finance and Operations and do unit testing for the changes. Additional develop/test instances can be purchased separately as optional add-on.

Tier-2 Environment: Standard Acceptance Testing

One Standard Acceptance Testing (UAT) instance is provided for the duration of the subscription. This instance is a non-production multi-box instance that customers can use for UAT, integration testing, and training. Additional sandbox/staging instances can be purchased separately as an optional add-on. 

Production Environment

One production instance is provided per tenant. The production multi-box instance includes disaster recovery and high availability. It will be provisioned when the implementation approaches the Operate phase, after the required activities in the Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycles Services (LCS) methodology and a successful go-live assessment are completed. Additionally, some file storage and database storage are included. 

To ensure accessibility of service all production environments are protected through high availability and disaster recovery features.  Disaster recovery features protect against outages broadly impacting an entire data center. Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations cloud architecture uses Azure availability sets for the compute tier to prevent single point of failure events. The Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations production environments are configured with disaster recovery support that includes:

1. Azure SQL active-geo replication for primary databases, with a Recovery Point Estimate (RPE) of < 5 seconds

     – The primary data stores are supported for replication

2. Geo redundant copies of Azure blob storage (containing document attachment) in other Azure regions

3. Same secondary region for Azure SQL and Azure Blob storage replications

Microsoft makes the following suggestions when creating and testing your disaster recovery plan:

  • In your plan, include the process for contacting support and for escalating issues. This information will help to avoid prolonged downtime as you work out the recovery process for the first time.
  • Evaluate the business impact of application failures.
  • Choose a cross-region recovery architecture for mission-critical applications.
  • Identify a specific owner of the disaster recovery plan, including automation and testing.
  • Document the process, especially any manual steps.
  • Automate the process as much as possible.
  • Establish a backup strategy for all reference and transactional data, and test backup restoration regularly.
  • Set up alerts for the stack of the Azure services consumed by your application.
  • Train operations staff to execute the plan.
  • Perform regular disaster simulations to validate and improve the plan.

Avantiico provides an overview of environments, on customer engagements, making sure disaster recovery protocols are understood and suggestions made.

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