Infrastructure costs, maintenance, and availability

Microsoft Dynamics NAV requires consistent initial investments to purchase or rent, if hosted, the required redundant hardware and software to guarantee high availability and a smooth daily activity. Moreover, it needs experienced IT staff to manage the whole system deployment monolith.

Once the system is fully functional, it also needs to be maintained. From time to time, the entire hardware will need to be upgraded, and additional software will also need to be added.

Keep in mind that a Microsoft life cycle has typically an on-premises mainstream life cycle of five years. After that period, Microsoft products have an extra five years of limited support (out of mainstream), where it is not possible anymore to enable the escalation chain to the relevant development team and only security hotfixes are guaranteed. After five years, then, Microsoft warmly suggests that the partner and the customer upgrade to the latest version.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there is no initial deployment cost. With the pay-as-you-go offering philosophy, customers simply have to choose, according to their business needs, an essential and/or premium user experience, depending on the application modules they need.

There is no need to take care of any hardware maintenance: Microsoft guarantees the underlying software to run on the latest technologies and fully patched with a close to zero or no downtime at all, and with a class-A uptime SLA.