Business Central Hosting with Tigunia vs. Microsoft

This blog post is part-three of a series on Business Central hosting. If you haven’t already, catch up on our hosting options and licensing blog posts.

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Alright, so you’ve chosen to use Business Central as your company ERP. You’re leaning toward hosting your data in the cloud.

The last question: Which provider should you choose?

You’re reading Tigunia’s blog, so naturally, this is where we plug ourselves as the best option. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner with hundreds of years of collective experience between our team members, we know what we’re doing. But you may be wondering why you might choose to host with a Microsoft partner rather than, say, Microsoft directly.

There are a few key reasons for that:

Customer service

Tigunia prides itself on the level of customer service we provide. Many of Tigunia’s executives have worked for end user companies in the past and are personally aware of the often-underwhelming level of customer service present in this field. A primary goal when Tigunia was founded was to tackle this problem head-on. When you partner with Tigunia, you don’t need to wait on the phone with customer service from Microsoft or submit a ticket and wait for them to reach out to you. When minutes matter, you can get someone on the phone at Tigunia quickly. With minimal wait times, exceptional friendliness, and a high-level of expertise, all based in North America, Tigunia is the partner you can count on.

Greater backup and recovery options

So, in short, on-premises hosting allows a business to own and control their data and environment at all times, where SaaS uses an environment that is controlled by a provider. Should you choose to host with Microsoft directly via a SaaS solution, your databases are protected by automatic backups that are kept for 28 days.

The backup includes data from any production and sandbox environments that the database contains. Administrators of a Business Central tenant can’t directly access or manage these backups because they’re managed automatically by Microsoft. But admins can restore their environments to a specific point in time in the past using the Business Central admin center.

This means if a restore is needed for something that happened before last months close, you won’t have the retention to re-visit the then-active data set. You also can’t request a backup copy of your production database.

You can, however, address some of these needs when you host with another provider, such as Tigunia. You could also host on-premises, which gives you total control, allows you to set your own backup and disaster recovery parameters that are in-line with your business objectives and industry regulations, and have industry-leading restore time objectives.

Greater control of flexibility and scalability

When you partner with Tigunia, your hosting solution can be built to your exact computational and storage needs. Your solution can ebb and flow as necessary, according to your demands in each moment.

Fortunately, when you host with Microsoft, you also get scalable storage solutions automatically. However, because it’s an automated process, you cannot choose when your solution scales. That means you could be operating at an average of 80 percent capacity, and the system will only scale your when it decides that it should (which takes a minimum of one hour).

In other words, if you have significant incremental or seasonal usage periods, you’ll be operating with bad performance until the system decides that you need better performance.

In some perspectives, this is a positive. However, depending on how your business operates, it can cost you. This means fewer team members gaining access to a database that lives on an overloaded server and slower performance in accessing that data.

When you host with Tigunia, you can control the exact computational and storage requirements at any point. You can change your resource allocation in mere moments rather than hours.

Predictability in cost and value

Predictability in cost has a lot to do with the previous factor of scalability.

While most hosting providers can match each other on computational scaling, data scaling is another example.

Microsoft, for example, issues storage options in large chunks:

With a SaaS solution with Microsoft, the storage alone can run the costs similar to an entire on-premises deployment by Tigunia.

Consider a current Tigunia client, whose current performance looks like this:

With latency measuring at about 1 millisecond, it’s near impossible to perform better than this.

Should this client, which has above-average performance and storage requirements, choose to host directly with Microsoft, the cost would be significantly higher. See the example below, which comes directly from the Azure Pricing Calculator.

Again, this is the cost of the storage alone. An entire solution implemented by Tigunia would be priced around this.

These are just the main differences. There are, of course, dozens of points of minutia and nuance that one could consider, as well: patching and security concerns, data recoverability, deployability of new features and updates, and so much more.

As is the case with your Business Central hosting and licensing options, there is no universal “right” choice when choosing who to host with. There are businesses that will benefit perfectly from Microsoft’s SaaS solution and others that will benefit better from Tigunia’s.

To weigh your options more thoroughly, contact Tigunia today.