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

Risks management is critical for every organization.  There was a time when the severity, definition and type of risks that a business may encounter were considered to be different. The risk was dependent on the size, nature of business and geographic location. Now that the core business apps and data are running in the cloud, the risks are the very much the same for every organization. 

Why risk management for the Cloud?

Cloud has leveled the playing field when it comes to risk management. Every organization big or small will face the same level of risk. The impact of the risk in $ value may be different. It is imperative for organizations to have a risk management plan to understand, analyze, mitigate and protect themselves from running their business in the cloud. This blog series is focused on understanding risk management with Microsoft Dataverse - Power Platform and Dynamics 365. (disclaimer - I am NOT a business risk management professional. This is my attempt to help you understand how risks can be managed when using Microsoft Dataverse)

#1 - Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

When you purchase Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power Platform licenses you will be provisioning 1 or more environments. Consider environment as a container for your business apps and data. You may have multiple development sandbox, testing, staging and production environments. Each environment has an instance of Microsoft Dataverse. Your business users are provisioned in the different environment. You may have your environments in 1 Geo region (lets say East Coast - US) which is nearest to your group of app users. You may even have users globally and have multiple environments in different Geo regions. How do you protect your environments from a unforeseen disaster in a geo region? How do you ensure that your mission critical business apps will be up and running asap and your data protected? 

Every cloud services provider has a well defined plan to protect their customers apps and data in the cloud. Microsoft has defined a Business Continuity and Disaster recovery plan for the Dataverse environments. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps - for the production environments a replica or copy is made in a second geo region (Geo secondary replica), of the different storage services like Azure SQL and file storage and compute infrastructure. The copy is done at the time of the deployment and on an ongoing basis they are kept synchronized (with some lag in minutes) through continuous data replication. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement - Geo Secondary Replica

Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps - The geo secondary replica is also done for this apps. 

Dynamics 365 - Finance and SCM apps

The replica environments are in a Azure region pair and have a dedicated low latency network. They also are within the data residency and compliance boundaries 

Azure region pairs

Failover types and service continuity - 

Unplanned failover - In case of an unplanned failover in an Azure geo region, Microsoft will notify customers and route traffic to the secondary geo replica region. There could be a possible data loss for about 15 minutes during the transition.

Planned failover - If there is a risk to the availability of the primary geo region (like an upcoming hurricane) Microsoft will notify the customers and transition to the secondary geo replica region. The users who are connected to Microsoft Dataverse apps may experience some disruption. There will be no data loss.

Failback - Once the primary geo region is back up and running Microsoft will notify customers and move to the primary region. Connected users may experience disruptions but there will be no data loss. 

Things to note - 

1. Dataverse for Team environments do not support the Geo Secondary replicas. So if you are using Dataverse for Teams environments please make sure to have a backup on a regular basis. 

2. The geo secondary replica is only available for production instances of Dataverse. All other instances will face service degradations till the primary regions is back up and running.

3. Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM apps will have limited functionality when working in the geo secondary replica region. The Financial Reporting and Power BI reporting services will not be available. Customers can open a support ticket with Microsoft to get the Financial Reporting setup running in the secondary region.

I hope this helps in understanding the business continuity and disaster recovery risk management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 - Dataverse platform. In my next blog I will write about Security and Data loss - Risks.

Thanks for reading.

@mihircrm

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