With the current surge of companies moving to the cloud to save money on hardware, built-in disaster recovery, flexibility, security, lower power costs, lower people costs, redundancy, etc., the need to have your ERP solution in the cloud is also something to aim for.
Using Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service) is a possibility. Companies like EVS (http://www.evs-sw.com/services/managed-hosting.html) are offering these type of solutions. You can probably accomplish the same on Azure, however I don't know if Sage offers any type of support or if licensing is an issue. If you do go the IaaS route on Azure, you still have to manage the server which is what most of us want to go away from.
The ideal option would be to move the Sage Db on to Azure SQL Database (Platform as a Service - PaaS). We tried doing this 2 years ago and it wasn't possible because the service was in its infancy and it did not support triggers among other things. In two years, the service has gotten substantially a lot better so we ran the Azure SQL Compatibility tool against our acuity_app database and crossed our fingers. The compatibility test failed but the errors were not as intimidating as I thought. The most prominent and repeating error was: "External references are not supported when creating a package from this platform". A google search revealed several possibilities, most over my head. However, is this something that Sage could and should look into? Most definitely.
As cloud computing advances, the software we want to run on it should embrace this new paradigm and adapt to it.
by: victor l. | over a year ago | 6 - General Enhancements
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I did a quick experiment to see if a Sage 500 database running a virtual SQL Server on Azure would have any issues working with local clients. After working through some issues, I was able to successfully get it to work as my network could see the virtual machine on Azure. I posted my steps and findings on Sage City and asked Sage to review my results to see if they would support such a configuration as many companies might find this useful.
So far no word from Sage if they will support this configuration or not, which is probably due to lack of pressure from the user community. If you want to see this configuration supported you need to vote for it to give this enhancement some weight.
We have migrated to Azure as of four years ago. We still have a Windows 2008 Server running SQL Server to support this antiquated capability that our business still relies on. We need to migrate away from this server and would prefer Azure SQL Database as we have a cloud-first adoption model. If Sage cannot assist with this support, we'll find another product for this purpose.