Microsoft’s Big Bet On The Cloud For Corporate Finance

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Microsoft is hardly new to cloud technology, and its enterprise-focused cloud computing platform, Azure, is the culmination of the tech giant’s recent Software-as-a-Service focus.

But Microsoft’s latest move for Azure is something analysts are calling a milestone. The company said this week that its new enterprise accounting solution, Dynamics AX, will run entirely on the Azure cloud infrastructure.

According to reports on Wednesday (March 9), other accounting solutions from Microsoft only ran partially on the cloud; with Dynamics AX, Fortune reports, Microsoft is going “all in” on cloud technology.

Microsoft, which announced its new corporate accounting tool on Tuesday (March 8), said that it rebuilt the solution from the ground up just for the cloud. In speaking with Microsoft technical fellow Mike Ehrenberg, reports said that the move by the company is part of efforts to assure corporate clients that cloud technology — and, more specifically, Azure — can be trusted for functions as vital as ERP and accounting.

Dynamics AX will be open across 137 markets on the planet and support 40 languages, reports added. Being built on the cloud, it will automatically update itself; reports also said that the solution is compatible with mobile devices and can interact over wireless connections.

Ehrenberg told reporters that businesses can first run the solution in test mode to be sure that it functions properly before going live to take the reins over a corporation’s financial data.

For businesses not yet convinced that an all-cloud solution is the safest move to manage their finances, Microsoft is allowing clients to use Dynamics AX through their in-house data centers. The catch is that they must wait until Microsoft rolls out the Window Server 2016 operating system, the SQL Server 2016 database and Azure Pack; reports said these should be released sometime this year.