If my house was burning down what would I take with me? Well, I used to say my photo albums, and I probably would have perished trying to carry them all out.Then along came the digital camera, so I would say I’d take the external hard drive that had a backup of my photos and my precious (well organised) music. The likelihood of my surviving the fire increased.
Today all my photos and all my music are stored on Skydrive, I pay something like $50 a year for 125GB of online storage and I can access my photos from anywhere. So now I can sleep easier as I know my photos are safely stored somewhere up in a cloud that Microsoft owns. I could escape the fire without hesitation. But what if the cloud catches fire? Well, I am sure Microsoft has a copy on another cloud somewhere else…two clouds on fire at once? Surely not!
Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 has just been released, which has been built to operate on Microsoft Windows Azure. Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to deploy and manage applications on Microsoft-managed data centres (the cloud). There are soon to be data centres in Australia. NAV2013 R2 also integrates with Office 365. Office 365 is basically the same Microsoft Office functionality you are used to, however you rent it and can access it over the Internet with documents saved on Skydrive.
So, consider the idea of all your business applications and data stored in a cloud over Australia, accessible from anywhere, at any time, on any device; would this make you sleep easier? You don’t have to remember to take the external hard drive home with you, or worse, if the office is on fire you don’t have to risk incineration trying to carry the server out. It is certainly a big leap of faith to move away from the soothing hum of your server room. But I think if I can trust my precious memories to Microsoft, more and more businesses will trust the cloud too.
