Improving Business Central Performance: Moving from Hosted On Premises to SaaS
At ArcherPoint, we live and breathe Business Central. Our business model is focused on Business Central implementations and upgrades, and we also run our business on Business Central.
Business Central hosted on premises
We have been running our Business Central instance for several years as an on-premises deployment, but it is hosted on Azure and uses Azure SQL. Azure SQL is capable of automatic tuning, meaning that it uses AI to optimize its processes and increase performance, in part by identifying indexes that should be added to the database and also identifying indexes that are no longer used and removing them. In addition, Microsoft recommends deploying to Azure SQL because it “eliminates the need to install and maintain a self-hosted integration runtime on-premises and ensures faster data replication.”
The most noticeable improvement in processing speed was in the nightly number crunching. At first, the nightly process took one hour to complete. When it completed self-optimizing itself, the overnight process only took 15 minutes, significantly improving over the original time.
Moving Business Central to SaaS
Recently, we migrated Business Central to a full Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment model – and the performance improvement was nothing short of amazing!
Both SaaS and hosted deployments use Azure SQL. At the start of the overnight process, which took 15 minutes after Azure SQL had completely self-optimized in the hosted deployment, it still took 15 minutes on the first night of the SaaS deployment. By the time Azure SQL completed its automatic tuning, the overnight process took only ten minutes to run, 33% faster than the performance we saw from a hosted environment*.
If you are looking to improve the performance of your Business Central implementation, consider moving to a SaaS deployment model. Contact ArcherPoint for expert guidance on how your company can realize the greatest performance from Business Central.
*Performance results will vary based on your environment and workloads. Please consult with ArcherPoint when considering changes to how you deploy your Business Central environment.