Managing Risks with Microsoft Dataverse Power Platform and Dynamics 365 - Part-1 - Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Risk management is crucial for every organization. With cloud technology being widely used today, every organization faces the same level of risk, regardless of its size or location. This post focuses on understanding risk management with Microsoft Dataverse-Power Platform and Dynamics 365.

The first part of the blog series talks about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR). When an organization purchases Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power Platform licenses, one or more environments are provisioned. Every environment has an instance of Microsoft Dataverse that acts as a container for the organization's business apps and data. To protect the mission-critical business apps and data from unforeseen disasters, Microsoft provides a Business Continuity and Disaster recovery plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps and Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps. 

For the Production environments of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps, a replica or copy is made in a second geo-region of the different storage services like Azure SQL and file storage and compute infrastructure. The same is done for Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps. The replica environments are within the data residency and compliance boundaries, and they are in an Azure region pair with a dedicated low latency network.

The failover types and service continuity options are also explained in detail. In case of an unplanned failover, Microsoft will notify and route traffic to the secondary geo replica region, and there could be a possible data loss for about 15 minutes during the transition. For a planned failover, Microsoft will notify customers and transition to the secondary geo replica region without data loss. Once the primary geo region is back up and running, Microsoft will notify customers and move back to the primary region.

There are some things to note, such as Dataverse for Team environments that do not support the Geo Secondary replicas and the geo secondary replica being available only for production instances. Also, Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps would have limited functionality when working in the secondary replica region, with Financial Reporting and Power BI reporting services not being available.

This post provides insightful information on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery to help organizations secure their sensitive data while using Microsoft Dataverse. Keep an eye out for the next blog in the series that covers Security and Data loss - Risks.

@mihircrm and #365withoutcode thank you for reading.