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

Risk management is crucial for any organization, and it becomes even more important when considering the cloud. As more businesses move their core apps and data to the cloud, risks become the same for everyone regardless of their size, nature of business, or geographic location. This means that organizations must have a risk management plan in place to analyze, mitigate, and protect themselves while doing business in the cloud. This blog series aims to help organizations understand risk management with Microsoft Dataverse, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365.

The first part of this series sheds light on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) with regards to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. When a business purchases licenses for these services, they provision one or more environments, with each environment serving as a container for their business apps and data. Multiple development sandbox, testing, staging, and production environments may be established, and each environment contains an instance of Microsoft Dataverse. So, how does one protect their instances from unforeseen disasters like geo-specific outages?

Thankfully, Microsoft has a well-defined Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan for Dataverse environments. For production environments, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps and Finance/SCM apps have geographically distinct replicas that are kept synchronized through continuous data replication with a lag in minutes. If there is a risk to the availability of the primary geo region, a planned failover route traffic to the secondary region, minimizing the impact of disruptions. However, the replica environment is only available for production instances of Dataverse, and all other instances will face service degradations till the primary region is back up and running.

It is important to note that Dataverse for Team environments does not support Geo Secondary replicas, so those who are using Dataverse for Teams environments must ensure that they have regular backups to avoid data loss. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps will have limited functionality when working in a secondary replica region, specifically, Financial Reporting and Power BI reporting services won't be available. Nevertheless, Microsoft provides excellent service continuity by notifying customers when there is a failover or failback. 

Overall, this blog post lays out the significance of risk management in the cloud and why Microsoft's Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan for Dataverse environments is worth being aware of. 

The next part of the series will focus on Security and Data loss – Risks. Be sure to check it out!

Thanks for reading!

@mihircrm

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