The price of Dynamics 365 licenses varies roughly from $8 to $210 per user per month, depending on user type, tenant, device or deployment scale. Attach licensing can cut the cost of a second app by 70–85%, and once implementation, data migration, training, and support are factored in, most organizations spend two to five times the license price in Year 1. From Year 2 onward, costs typically settle to about 1.3x the license cost. 

If you’ve spent any time searching for straight answers on what Dynamics 365 actually costs, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: most pages give you a price list and stop there. That’s not a budget, it’s a starting bid. The license fee is real, but it’s usually only 20–30% of what an organization spends in the first year, once implementation, data migration, integrations, and training are added in. 

This guide walks through the whole picture: per-app pricing, how attach licensing actually works (with the math shown, not just claimed), what full implementation and total cost of ownership look like across company sizes, how Dynamics 365 stacks up against Salesforce and NetSuite on cost, and the licensing changes coming in 2026 that will affect your budget whether you’ve priced them in yet or not. 

What Is Dynamics 365 and How Does Its Pricing Model Work? 

Dynamics 365 isn’t a single product. It’s Microsoft’s family of cloud-based ERP and CRM applications, covering sales, customer service, finance, supply chain, field service, and project operations. Each application is licensed and priced separately, which is exactly why “how much does Dynamics 365 cost” doesn’t have a one-line answer. A five-person sales team and a 300-person manufacturing operation are buying two very different combinations of apps. 

Pricing follows a named-user, per-user-per-month model, billed monthly or annually. Rather than paying for a single “Dynamics 365” license, an organization licenses each application a user needs: Sales, Customer Service, Business Central, and so on, and pricing scales with both the app and the depth of functionality required (Professional versus Enterprise tiers, for instance). Layered on top of base app pricing is attach pricing, which rewards users who need more than one app with a steep discount on the second and subsequent apps. We’ll break that down with real numbers in the next section. 

For a broader look at what each application actually does, see our Dynamics 365 modules overview.

Dynamics 365 Pricing by Application (2026 Price List) 

Here’s where most pricing guides start and stop. We’re including it because it’s genuinely useful, just don’t treat it as your budget. 

Source: Microsoft  

How Attach Licensing Works (With Worked Examples) 

This is the part almost every competing guide skips, and it’s where real budget accuracy lives. 

Attach pricing means that once a user holds a “base” qualifying license. It is generally the highest-priced app they need; additional Dynamics 365 apps for that same user are priced at a steep discount, usually in the $20–$30 per user per month range, rather than full list price. 

Worked example: Sales + Customer Service: A user who needs both Sales Enterprise ($105/month) and Customer Service Enterprise ($105/month) would pay $210/month at standalone pricing. With attach pricing, the second app attaches at roughly $22/month, bringing the combined cost to about $127/month, a savings of nearly 40% for that user alone. 

The strategic lesson: sequence your purchase so that the most expensive app a user needs becomes their base license, and add everything else as attachments. Buying apps in the wrong order, cheapest first, forfeits most of this discount, since attach pricing only applies going up in tier, not down. 

Licensing Terms: Monthly, Annual, and Multi-Year 

Dynamics 365 is available on monthly, annual, and multi-year commitments, and the term you choose has real budget consequences beyond the sticker price. 

• Monthly billing: In this model, you can add or eliminate the seats according to your feasibility. Per-user rate is quite high but it is the best option for piloting a new tool or seasonal headcount.  
• Annual billing: Lower per-user rate, price locked for 12 months; reducing seat count generally has to wait until renewal. 
• Multi-year / Enterprise Agreement: Yearly billing prices can be easily negotiated. Cloud Solution Provider can help you with the pricing or direct Enterprise Agreement can do the same.  

Procurement teams should weigh workforce volatility against savings: an organization with unpredictable headcount often loses more to over-committed annual seats than it saves on the per-user discount. 

Beyond Licensing: True Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) 

License cost is the number everyone quotes and the number that matters least for budgeting. Here’s what shows up on the invoice over time. 

Implementation services costs by module 

Implementation scope and cost vary enormously by module and complexity. Business Central projects for smaller organizations tend to run $25,000–$80,000, while enterprise Finance and Supply Chain Management rollouts with heavy customization commonly land between $150,000 and $500,000+. 

Data migration, integration, and customization costs 

Migrating the current data to a new platform, integrating it to other platforms (r-commerce, banking, and more) and configuring the workflows: these add up to the project budget. Hence, the software license cost may exceed the estimated budget.  

Training and change management costs 

Organizations should estimate a budget for end-to-end training sessions and change management programs that can lead to faster adoption. This can add to better performance of Dynamics 365 post-launch.  

Ongoing support costs (Year 2+) 

After go-live, ongoing costs, support retainers, minor enhancements, and periodic optimization tend to stabilize significantly compared to Year 1. 

Hidden costs (Azure, Power BI, ISV apps, Copilot Credits) 

You might not know but there are several costs that add to the base subscription cost. Azure for custom integrations, ISV apps, Copilot, Power BI premium capacity are a few add-ons that are not included in the base subscription.  

Bottom line: expect Year 1 total cost of ownership at roughly 2–5x the annual license cost, settling to around 1.3x from Year 2 onward. For a deeper walkthrough of what a project timeline actually looks like, see our Dynamics 365 implementation timeline guide. 

Dynamics 365 Pricing by Company Size 

Small business (under 50 employees) 

Typically, Business Central plus a small number of Sales or Customer Service seats, with a lighter implementation scope and minimal customization. 

Mid-market (50–500 employees) 

Often a mix of Sales/Customer Service Enterprise plus Business Central or Finance, with moderate integration needs and multiple departments involved in rollout. 

Enterprise (500+ employees) 

End-to-end Finance and Supply Chain Management deployments, integrations, phased rollouts, heavy customizations etc. Across geogrophoes and business units.  

Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce vs. NetSuite: Pricing Comparison 

At comparable tiers, Dynamics 365 is frequently less expensive than Salesforce, and attach pricing widens that gap further for organizations needing multiple apps per user. NetSuite’s tenant-based structure makes direct per-user comparison harder, since much of the cost sits in the base platform fee rather than a clean per-seat number. If you’re actively weighing a move from Salesforce, our Salesforce vs Dynamics 365 page covers the switching process in detail.

2026 Dynamics 365 Licensing Changes to Know 

Microsoft is removing previously seeded AI Builder credits from Power Platform and Dynamics 365 licenses starting in November 2026, shifting more AI-driven automation onto metered Copilot Credit billing. Organizations that built workflows around included AI Builder capacity should reassess usage now rather than after the change lands. Finance and Operations license validation is also getting stricter in 2026, meaning organizations with loosely tracked user assignments are more likely to face true-up costs at renewal. For AI-specific cost planning, see our Copilot for Dynamics 365: features and pricing breakdown. 

How Beyond Key Helps You Get Dynamics 365 Pricing Right 

Beyond Key is a Microsoft Solutions Partner confirm current designation, with more than 100 Dynamics 365 implementations completed across manufacturing, distribution, professional services, and retail clients. Rather than hourly estimates that leave budget open-ended, we work from a fixed-price-quote philosophy: a license mix review, module recommendation, and implementation scoping process that produces a proposal you can actually budget against. 

Our implementation approach 

Discovery → Design → Build/Configure → Data Migration → Training → Go-Live → Support — a phased methodology built to keep scope, timeline, and cost visible at every stage rather than surfacing surprises at the invoice. 

Customer success example

CGIAR Systems Organization implemented Dynamics 365 for Sales Module for donations, fundraising and volunteer management.

Download this case study to see how we helped them with license audit and increased ROI outcomes. See our Dynamics 365 case studies to know more about how we helped our customers with Dynamics 365 solutions.  

Our clientele: Fenix, CGIAR

Industries we serve 

• Manufacturing: Supply Chain Management-heavy configurations for inventory and production planning. 
• Distribution: Finance plus Supply Chain Management for multi-warehouse operations. 
• Professional services: Project Operations paired with Sales for engagement-based billing. 
• Retail: Customer Service and Sales Enterprise with commerce integrations. 
• Nonprofit: Business Central with grant and fund accounting configurations. 
• Financial services: Finance with heightened compliance and audit-trail requirements. 

Explore our full Dynamics 365 Services or our Business Central Services for module-specific detail. 

Frequently Asked Questions:

The post Dynamics 365 Pricing Guide: Costs, Licensing, and Implementation Explained (2026) appeared first on Beyond Key.

Why Are Organizations Migrating VMware to the Cloud?

Quick answer: Organizations around the globe are increasingly migrating VMware to the cloud because of increased licensing costs by Broadcom, scalability issues, and the desire to move to the cloud for better data recovery and security concerns. 

VMware ran quietly in the background of most enterprise data centers for two decades. Then Broadcom bought VMware in 2023 and changed the rules. Perpetual licenses disappeared. Bundled subscriptions replaced à la carte pricing. Many IT leaders opened their renewal quote and found it two to five times higher than before. 

A widely referenced 2025 Forbes analysis summarizes the current market sentiment:

“Customers are scrambling for VMware alternatives or reluctantly accepting Broadcom’s new rules.”

Source: Forbes

That price shock started the conversation. But it isn’t the only reason teams are moving. Below are the driving factors behind the shift: 

• Shift in license prices: Higher costs and forced bundling pushed budget owners to look elsewhere. 
• Infrastructure modernization: Aging hardware refresh cycles are a natural trigger to rethink the whole stack. 
• Data center exit: Fewer companies want to own racks, cooling, and physical security anymore. 
• Disaster recovery: It is less expensive and more reliable in the cloud rather than VMware or secondary sites.  
• Operational cost optimization: With cloud, the finance department ensures that the expenses are tied to actual usage. 
• Security and compliance: Cloud supports automated patching and global compliance that are better than local data center capabilities.  
• AI and analytics readiness: Cloud supports adopting containers and managed services, which helps them embrace AI features and modernization.  

Before You Migrate: Ask These 7 Critical Questions 

Most VMware migration content jumps straight to tools. That’s a mistake. The right questions come first, and they shape every decision that follows. 

1. Are your applications cloud-ready? 

Some legacy apps assume local storage paths or hardware dongles. Find these before you plan a wave. 

2. What are your workload dependencies? 

An app rarely stands alone. Map what talks to what before you move anything. 

3. What downtime can the business tolerate? 

A finance system and an internal wiki have very different tolerance levels. 

4. Which workload should remain on-premise? 

Not everything needs to move. Some workloads are cheaper or safer where they are. 

5. Do you need application modernization? 

Some apps are worth refactoring during the move. Most are not, at least not yet. 

6. What compliance requirements apply? 

Data residency and industry regulations can rule out certain regions or services outright. 

7. Have you estimated migration costs? 

Include network, tooling, staff time, and parallel-running costs, not just cloud infrastructure. 

Answering these honestly, before vendor conversations start, keeps the project grounded in your actual environment instead of a generic playbook. 

Choosing the Right Migration Strategy 

Every workload fits one of six migration paths. Picking the wrong one is the single biggest cause of migration delays. 

VMware to Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud: Which Option Fits Your Business? 

The three major VMware-native cloud services look similar on paper. The differences show up in ecosystem fit. 

Azure VMware Solution 

Pros: It promotes deep integration with Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and existing Azure workloads. Suitable for businesses already using Microsoft tools.
Cons: Not so beneficial for organizations that are not Microsoft-centric.
Best for: Enterprises running Active Directory, M365, or Dynamics 365 alongside VMware. 

Google Cloud VMware Engine 

Pros: Powerful data analytics and AI tooling once workloads land in Google Cloud.
Cons: Not so big VMware-specific partner ecosystem compared to Azure and AWS.
Best for: Businesses who want to choose Google’s AI stack and BigQuery. 

VMware Cloud on AWS 

Pros: Mature service with strong global region coverage and comprehensive AWS service integration.
Cons: Pricing is complicated, and Microsoft workload integration is ineffective than Azure’s.
Best for: Organizations already leveraging workloads on AWS. 

VMware Migration Roadmap (Step-by-Step) 

A structured roadmap keeps a migration from turning into a series of fire drills. Each step feeds the next. Skipping discovery to save time, for example, usually shows up later as a missed dependency during cutover, which costs far more time to fix. 

Assess: Discover workloads, assess infrastructure, map dependencies, and evaluate cloud readiness. 

Decide: Select the migration approach, then plan networking and security requirements. 

Migrate: Run a pilot, execute migration waves, and validate workloads after cutover. 

Optimize: Tune performance, resolve issues, and optimize cloud costs for long-term efficiency. 

Microsoft recommends structured planning through the Cloud Adoption Framework paired with Azure VMware Solution guidance. This pairing gives teams a governance model alongside the technical migration path, rather than treating governance as an afterthought. 

VMware Migration Tools Comparison 

What are VMware Migration Best Practices? 

• Start with workload discovery, not tool selection 
• Categorize applications by business criticality 
• Build migration waves around dependency groups, not alphabetical order 
• Validate dependencies before, not during, cutover 
• Plan rollback procedures for every wave 
• Optimize network connectivity ahead of the first migration 
• Test disaster recovery in the new environment, don’t assume it 
• Automate repeatable steps where possible 
• Use pilot migrations to catch issues early and cheaply 
• Monitor post-migration performance for at least 30 days 
• Optimize cloud costs continuously, not just at go-live 
• Document governance so the next team doesn’t start from zero

What Are Common VMware Migration Challenges (and How to Overcome Them)?  

How Beyond Key Helps Simplify VMware Cloud Migration? 

Moving off VMware touches infrastructure, security, cost, and application teams at once. Few internal teams have bandwidth to run a full migration alongside their regular workload. Beyond Key supports each stage of that process, from the first readiness assessment through post-migration optimization: 

• Cloud readiness assessments that map your current VMware footprint against migration options 
• Azure expertise spanning Azure VMware Solution and native Azure services 
• Landing zone design built on Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework 
• Migration planning across discovery, waves, and cutover 
• Infrastructure modernization for workloads that need more than a lift-and-shift 
• Managed cloud services after go-live 
• Security and governance reviews aligned to Zero Trust principles 
• Post-migration optimization for performance and reliability 
• Cost optimization and FinOps support to keep cloud spend predictable 

Beyond Key is a Microsoft Solutions Partner with 20+ years of experience. We are HIPAA compliant, SOC II Type and ISO Certified.  

Industries we serve: Healthcare, Manufacturing, eCommerce, Logistics, Finance & Banking, Education, Automotive and more. Here are the certifications our professionals hold: AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate, AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Solution Architect, AZ-400 Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and Terraform associate.  

One of our real-world case studies: 

Client name: SZUL, a renowned Manhattan-based online jeweler  

What they wanted: An attractive, heavily featured website with a database, high-end applications (both web and mobile), high storage, and computing capacity for fast performance and 24/7 availability.  

How did we help? Beyond Key helped SZUL set up AWS cloud computing services to increase website performance and handle extreme traffic during the peak season. Our cloud experts used load balancers, Amazon S3 Glacier, cloud-based Amazon S3 and a lot of features to improve the overall website’s performance. You can learn in detail how we helped SZUL perform well here.  

To learn more about our projects, you can download our case studies from here. 

Frequently Asked Questions: 

The post Migrate VMware to Cloud: Best Practices, Tools, and Common Challenges appeared first on Beyond Key.

Can you really build agentic AI without using credits? 

Yes, in two specific ways. First, agents that run inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams or SharePoint for authenticated Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users are zero rated, so internal agents can be built and used without drawing Copilot Credits. Second, you can build the agent on Azure AI services directly, which bills on Azure consumption instead of the Copilot Credit meter. 

One caveat we will be honest about up front. Zero credit does not mean zero cost. It means you stop paying on a meter you cannot tune and start paying on one you can. 

First, understand what AI credit is 

Copilot Credits are the billing currency for agent activity across Copilot Studio and related Microsoft agent surfaces. The pricing model moved from per message to per credit in September 2025. 

You buy capacity two ways: 

• Capacity pack: $200 per month for 25,000 credits, roughly $0.008 per credit 
• Pay as you go: roughly $0.01 per credit, metered through a linked Azure subscription 

Two rules catch teams out: 

• Unused credits do not roll over. Usage resets on the first day of each month. 
• If you exceed purchased capacity, enforcement can apply and agents can be denied service. 

Key Statistics: 

Gartner’s Q1 2026 survey found that 80% of enterprise applications shipped or updated that quarter now embed at least one AI agent, up from roughly a third in 2024 — while a separate Gartner CIO survey found only 17% of organizations have deployed agents at scale, with over 60% planning to within two years (Gartner, 2026 Hype Cycle for Agentic AI). That gap between intent and production is exactly where credit-burn surprises happen. 

Where credits go 

This is the table that matters. The cost of your agent is decided by its design, not by the headline pack price. 

Read that list again and the design implications become obvious. 

• One ten turn support chat grounded in tenant data does not cost 10 credits. It can cost well over 100. 
• Autonomous triggers are never rated zero. Even with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, every trigger bills. 
• Reasoning models bill twice: the feature rate plus the premium tool rate on reasoning tokens. 

Always confirm current rates against the Microsoft Learn billing rates table before you commit budget. Microsoft updates them. 

• Microsoft’s official reference for these rates is the Copilot Studio messages and capacity management documentation and the Copilot Studio billing and licensing FAQ on Microsoft Learn. 

Route 1: Design inside the zero rated boundary 

The cheapest agent is the one Microsoft already includes. 

What is zero rated (subject to fair use limits): 

• Agents used by authenticated Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users 
• Running inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams or SharePoint 
• Covering classic answers, generative answers and Microsoft Graph tenant grounding 

What is never zero rated: 

• External or customer facing agents on a website, WhatsApp or a mobile app 
• Any unlicensed or anonymous user 
• Autonomous triggers, without exception 
• Standalone channels outside the Microsoft 365 surface 

Practical design rules: 

1. Keep employee facing agents inside Teams, SharePoint or Copilot Chat. Do not publish them to a custom channel out of habit. 
2. Require authentication. An anonymous entry point converts a free interaction into a billed one. 
3. Split personas. Build one internal agent inside the entitlement and a separate, deliberately narrower external agent that you meter. 
4. Do not chase autonomy you do not need. A scheduled human triggered run is free of trigger charges in a way an event driven autonomous agent is not. 

Read the full BI Copilot case study → 

Route 2: Build on Azure instead of the credit meter 

When you need external users, high volume, or full control over model behaviour, move the agent off the Copilot Credit meter entirely and build it on Azure. You then pay Azure consumption: tokens, compute, storage and search. 

Component mapping: 

Why teams choose this route: 

• You control the model. Route simple tasks to a small model and reserve frontier models for genuine reasoning. 
• You control caching. Repeat questions can be served from a cache or a stored answer rather than a fresh generation. 
• You control retrieval. One well tuned search call replaces several grounding calls. 
• Costs scale with tokens, which you can measure, cap and optimise. 
• No monthly expiry. Azure consumption does not evaporate on the first of the month. 

What you trade away: low code speed, built in channel connectors, and the governance scaffolding Copilot Studio gives you for free. This route needs real engineering.

Read the full Azure OpenAI chatbot case study →  

Beyond Key’s Enterprise RAG Chatbot Development practice specializes in exactly this kind of Azure-native, credit-meter-free build. 

Route 3: If you must use Copilot Studio, cut the burn 

Sometimes the platform is already chosen. These patterns reduce consumption without reducing capability. 

• Deterministic first routing. Answer the top 30 known questions with classic topics at 1 credit each. Send only the unknown ones to generative answers. 
• Ground once, not repeatedly. Cache the retrieved context for the session instead of calling tenant grounding on every turn. 
• Skip Graph grounding when a connector will do. A direct Dataverse or SQL lookup through an action is often cheaper and more accurate than a 10 credit graph query. 
• Batch autonomous work. A scheduled agent processing 200 queued events costs far less in triggers than 200 event driven runs. 
• Gate premium reasoning. Put reasoning models behind an explicit condition, not in the default path. 
• Set per environment and per agent budgets. Power Platform admin centre supports consumption limits. One experimental agent should never be able to exhaust the tenant pool and disable production agents. 
• Measure credits per resolved task, not credits per message. It is the only number that tells you whether the agent is worth running. 

Beyond Key has also applied the same “workflow-first, generative-second” discipline to a SharePoint document automation build for a New York–based insurance software company, replacing manual, repetitive approval and update-request tasks with structured Power Automate flows rather than open agent conversations. Read the Power Automate case study → 

Which route should you pick? 

Prove it before you scale it 

Whichever route you choose, instrument it from day one. 

• Track credits or tokens per conversation and per resolved task 
• Track escalation rate and human correction rate alongside cost 
• Set hard spend caps with alerts before production, not after the first invoice 
• Re-run the numbers after every model or platform change, because rates move 

One more planning note. Microsoft has signaled that AI Builder capabilities move to Copilot Credit billing from late 2026. If your automation estate leans on AI Builder credits today, model that shift now rather than discovering it at renewal. 

How Beyond Key helps 

Beyond Key is a Chicago headquartered Microsoft Solutions Partner working across Azure AI, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, SharePoint and Microsoft 365. We help teams do three things: 

• Model credit consumption for a proposed agent before a single line is built 

• Split agent architectures so internal use stays inside the entitlement, and only external traffic is metered 

• Build Azure native agent systems when the credit meter is the wrong economics for the workload – through our Agentic AI Consulting Services and Microsoft Copilot Agents practice 

If you already have an agent in production and the bill is climbing, we can audit the design and show you where the credits are going, the same diagnostic approach behind our accounts payable automation, Azure SQL chatbot, and BI Copilot engagements referenced above. Browse the full library of Beyond Key case studies across Microsoft AI, Copilot, and Azure projects. 

Frequently asked questions 

Is Copilot Studio free? Building agents is free. Using them is not, unless the interaction falls inside the zero-rated boundary: authenticated Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users, on Microsoft 365 surfaces. Everything else consumes credits. 

Does a Microsoft 365 Copilot license cover all agent usage? No. It covers a lot of internal usage subject to fair use, but not external agents, unlicensed users, or autonomous triggers. 

How many credits does a typical conversation use? It depends entirely on what the agent does. The scripted answer is 1 credit. A grounded, multiturn, tool calling conversation can run into the hundreds. Model your own flow rather than trusting an average. 

Can I build agentic AI on Azure without touching Copilot Studio at all? Yes. Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework or Semantic Kernel with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search and Azure Functions gives you a complete agent stack billed on Azure consumption. 

Is the Azure route cheaper? Often at volume, rarely at low volume. Copilot Studio wins on speed to first agent. Azure wins when traffic is high, users are external, or you need model level control. Run both numbers. 

Do unused credits roll over? No. Capacity resets monthly and unused credits expire. 

What happens if we run out of credits mid-month? Enforcement can apply and agents can stop responding. Most teams keep pay as you go enabled as a safety net behind their packs. 

Which workloads are best to start with? Internal IT and HR answering, policy lookup, document summarization, ticket triage and order status queries. High volume, well bounded, easy to measure.

The post How to Build Agentic AI Solutions Without Credit Usage  appeared first on Beyond Key.

Introduction 

Microsoft 365 gives your teams powerful tools to work from anywhere. But every new user, device, and app also opens a door. Microsoft Secure Score is the number that tells you how many of those doors are still unlocked. 

Identity attacks are not slowing down. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report, identity-based attacks jumped 32% in just the first half of 2025, and password spray now accounts for 97% of them. 

At Beyond Key, an assessment does more than provide a score. It identifies security gaps across identities, devices, apps, data, and cloud workloads. It also highlights the most important issues to fix first. 

What is Microsoft Secure Score? 

Microsoft Secure Score is a built-in measurement inside the Microsoft Defender portal. It reviews your Microsoft 365 environment. It checks which recommended security controls are enabled. It then gives you a score based on Microsoft’s recommendations. 

Think of it less as a report card and more as a map. It shows you: 

• Where your security gaps sit today 
• Which fixes carry the most risk reduction 
• How your posture compares with similar organizations 
• How your score changes over time as you make improvements 

The score recalculates roughly every 24 hours, based on your current configuration, per Microsoft Entra’s Identity Secure Score guidance. That makes it a living picture, not a one-time snapshot. This is what separates measuring security from improving it. A score by itself changes nothing. Acting on the gaps behind it does. 

How Microsoft Secure Score Works: Understanding the Scoring Methodology 

Each recommended action inside Secure Score carries a point value. That value reflects how much risk the action removes, not just whether a box is checked. Enabling MFA for admin accounts greatly improves security. It has a bigger impact than changing minor app settings. At Beyond Key, we help clients understand which security actions matter most. This helps teams focus on high-impact improvements instead of chasing easy score increases. 

Secure Score groups these actions into categories that map to how attackers actually move: 

• Identity security: authentication, access, and privilege controls 
• Device security: endpoint compliance and protection 
• Data protection: classification, labeling, and loss prevention 
• Threat protection: detection and automated response 
• Compliance: policy and regulatory alignment 

Here is something most organizations get wrong: chasing a higher number is not the goal. Some recommendations will not fit every business. A hospital and a law firm do not share the same risk profile. The real goal is closing the gaps that matter most to your environment, not maxing out every category on the dashboard. 

What is a Good Microsoft Secure Score? 

There is no universal passing grade. A “good” score depends on your industry, your risk tolerance, and what data you handle. In our experience, most organizations start with low or average Secure Scores. Many have important security gaps. With the right remediation plan, they can significantly improve their security posture. 

A high score can still hide a real gap if it comes from low-impact settings. A lower score is not automatically dangerous if the missing actions carry little weight. The number is a starting point for a conversation, not the final verdict. This is also why Gartner’s cybersecurity guidance consistently frames security maturity as a continuous program, not a single benchmark to hit and forget. 

Architecture-Led Microsoft Security Framework for Improving Microsoft Secure Score 

Improving Secure Score takes more than working through a checklist. Organizations need an architecture that connects identity, devices, apps, data, and cloud protection into one working system.  

During Microsoft 365 security assessments, we regularly see MFA enabled for regular staff but missing for privileged accounts, the exact users attackers want most. Microsoft’s own threat research backs up why this matters so much: phishing-resistant multifactor authentication can block over 99% of identity-based attacks, yet many tenants still leave gaps in exactly the accounts that would benefit most. 

Here is how the six core layers fit together, and where we most often find gaps during a Microsoft Secure Score Assessment: 

• Microsoft Entra ID: Identity Protection Covers MFA, Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, and identity risk detection. Gaps here show up as weak authentication, unauthorized access, and accounts with more privilege than they need. 
• Microsoft Defender XDR: Threat Protection Covers endpoint protection, email security, identity threat detection, and automated response. Gaps here let malware, phishing, and advanced threats slip through. 
• Microsoft Intune: Device Management Covers device compliance, mobile device management, app protection, and BYOD controls. Gaps here mean unmanaged devices and unpatched endpoints. 
• Microsoft Sentinel: SIEM and Threat Intelligence Covers security analytics, threat hunting, investigation, and automated workflows. Gaps here mean poor visibility and slow response when something does go wrong. 
• Microsoft Purview: Data Protection and Compliance Covers data classification, sensitivity labels, DLP, and compliance management. Gaps here lead to data leakage and regulatory exposure. 
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Cloud Security Posture Management Covers cloud recommendations, vulnerability assessment, and hybrid workload protection. Gaps here mean cloud misconfiguration, which remains one of the most common ways breaches happen. 

The business case for getting this right is not abstract. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report found that organizations with a mature Zero Trust approach saved an average of $1.76 million per breach compared with those without one. That single figure tends to get budget conversations moving faster than any dashboard screenshot. 

How to Perform a Microsoft Secure Score Assessment 

1. Review your current score. Inside the Microsoft Defender portal to see where you stand today. 
2. Identify high-risk gaps. Focus on actions tied to identity and privileged access first. 
3. Prioritize recommendations. By impact, not by how easy they are to implement. 
4. Implement security controls. In phases, starting with the highest-risk category. 
5. Monitor continuously. Since your score shifts as your environment, staff, and threats change. 

During one client engagement, we found legacy authentication enabled on a few mailboxes. The team disabled it to close the security gap. This improved the organization’s identity score within a few weeks. It also blocked a common attack method that cybercriminals still use. 

How Beyond Key Helps Improve Microsoft Secure Score 

Beyond Key runs Microsoft Secure Score Consulting engagements built around this same architecture-first approach. Our team delivers: 

• A full Microsoft Secure Score Assessment 
• A Microsoft 365 security posture review 
• Detailed security gap analysis 
• Architecture recommendations across identity, devices, data, and cloud 
• Hands-on Microsoft Security Services implementation 
• Continuous optimization through Microsoft Cloud Consulting Services and ongoing monitoring 

Beyond Key is a Microsoft Solutions Partner with ISO 27001:2022 certification. The team has experience in Microsoft security, cloud, and AI solutions. This includes Microsoft Copilot governance and security consulting. We do not just point at a dashboard. We help you fix what it shows, and we stay involved as your environment and your score evolve.  

If your Secure Score has been sitting untouched, that is worth a closer look. Contact our Microsoft security consulting team for a security assessment. We will help you understand your current security posture. 

Conclusion 

Microsoft Secure Score identifies where your Microsoft 365 environment is exposed. But a higher number alone does not make you secure. Strong security requires the right architecture, governance, and ongoing improvements. A Secure Score alone is not enough. Microsoft security experts help turn Secure Score into an action plan. This helps strengthen your security over time. 

Frequently Asked Questions:

The post Microsoft Secure Score Assessment: How to Identify and Fix Microsoft 365 Security Gaps appeared first on Beyond Key.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an AI-powered enterprise platform that brings end-to-end CRM and ERP capabilities together. It helps organizations streamline their sales, services, supply chain, marketing, and finance operations. Per your business requirements, you can select modules and categorize them into domains. So, you don’t have to pay for a one-size-fits-all solution.  

Quick answer: Microsoft Dynamics 365 overview in one line: it’s Microsoft’s modular, cloud-first suite of CRM and ERP applications, built on the Power Platform and Dataverse, used by businesses to run sales, service, finance, and supply chain operations from connected data. 

Dynamics 365 CRM vs. ERP; What’s the Difference? 

This is one of the most common points of confusion for anyone new to the platform, and the honest answer is that Dynamics 365 isn’t strictly one or the other; it’s both, divided into separate applications. 

CRM applications in the Dynamics 365 suite focus on customer-facing work: tracking leads, managing service cases, scheduling technicians, and running marketing campaigns. ERP applications focus on the back office: financial reporting, inventory, procurement, manufacturing, and payroll-adjacent HR processes. A company might run only the CRM side, only on the ERP side, or both together, depending on what problems it’s trying to solve. 

A company might run only the CRM side, only the ERP side, or both together, depending on what problems it’s trying to solve. 

For a deeper breakdown of how each individual application fits into a broader rollout, see our Dynamics 365 implementation guide or our overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE). 

Dynamics 365 CRM Applications  

The CRM side of Dynamics 365 is what most mid-sized businesses evaluate first, largely because it competes directly with Salesforce and HubSpot. Each app below can be licensed on its own or bundled together. 

Dynamics 365 Sales 

Dynamics 365 Sales is the pipeline and opportunity management application. It gives sales teams a structured view of leads, deals, forecasts, and relationships, with AI-assisted features that flag at-risk deals and suggest next steps based on email and meeting activity. Sales Enterprise adds forecasting, playbooks, and deeper customization compared to the entry-level Sales Professional tier. Teams already using Outlook and Teams tend to adopt it faster because activities sync directly into the CRM record without extra data entry. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is the case-management and support application. It routes tickets, tracks SLAs, and gives agents a unified view of a customer’s history across channels, chat, email, phone, and self-service portals. Copilot-assisted case summarization and suggested responses have become a bigger differentiator in recent releases, cutting down average handle time for agents working high case volumes. 

Dynamics 365 Field Service 

Dynamics 365 Field Service manages on-site technicians: scheduling, dispatching, work orders, and inventory tracking for parts used in the field. It’s built for industries like HVAC, utilities, and equipment maintenance, where a technician’s calendar, van stock, and customer contract terms all need to line up before a truck rolls. Resource scheduling optimization can auto-assign jobs based on technician skill, location, and availability rather than manual dispatch boards. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (Marketing) 

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combines what used to be two separate products; Customer Insights (data) and Dynamics 365 Marketing into a single customer data and journey-orchestration app. It unifies customer profiles from multiple sources, builds segments, and triggers real-time marketing journeys across email, SMS, and other channels. For businesses trying to personalize outreach without stitching together a separate CDP, this is the module that closes that gap. 

• Read more: Dynamics 365 For Marketing – What It Is and How It Helps. 

Dynamics 365 ERP Applications  

The ERP side runs the parts of a business that customers never see directly, but that keep the business solvent. These modules are more complex to implement than the CRM apps and usually involve a longer rollout timeline. 

Finance 

Dynamics 365 Finance handles general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, budgeting, and financial reporting for mid-sized to large organizations, with built-in compliance and multi-entity, multi-currency support. 

Check out this: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations vs Business Central 

Supply Chain Management 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management covers inventory, procurement, manufacturing, and warehouse operations, with planning tools designed to help businesses respond to demand shifts and supplier disruptions. 

Business Central (SMB-tier ERP) 

Business Central is the ERP application built specifically for small and mid-sized businesses that need core financial and operational management without the complexity or cost of the full Finance and Supply Chain Management apps. 

Human Resources 

Dynamics 365 Human Resources manages employee records, benefits administration, leave and absence tracking, and compensation planning, integrating with payroll systems rather than replacing them outright. 

How Dynamics 365 Apps Work Together (The Platform Layer) 

What separates Dynamics 365 from a pile of unrelated software is the platform underneath it. Every core app- Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Customer Insights, and most of the ERP suite reads and writes to Dataverse, Microsoft’s shared business data platform. That means a service opened in Customer Service can reference the same customer record used in Sales, without a nightly sync job or a third-party integration tool holding it together. 

On top of Dataverse sits the Power Platform: Power BI for reporting, Power Automate for workflow automation, Power Apps for custom interfaces, and Copilot Studio for building AI agents. A Dynamics 365 application isn’t really a closed box, it’s a starting point that most businesses eventually extend with a Power Automate flow or a Power BI dashboard pulling straight from the same data. This is also where pairing Dynamics 365 with Power BI reporting tends to pay off, since finance and sales leaders get a single source of truth rather than exporting spreadsheets from separate systems. 

The Dynamics 365 release plan for 2026 release wave 1 announces the latest updates to customers as features are prepared for release.  

Source: Microsoft   

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Pricing & Licensing 

Dynamics 365 pricing is per-user, per-month, and it varies significantly by application. As a general guide for 2026: 

Two things matter more than the sticker price. First, Microsoft’s “attach” pricing model rewards multi-app adoption; once a user has a full-price base license, additional qualifying apps are typically far cheaper, which is why bundling Sales with Customer Service, for instance, often costs less per app than buying either alone. Second, the license fee is only one line item. Implementation, data migration, integrations, and training commonly cost several times the annual license total, particularly for ERP rollouts. 

Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce (and Other CRMs) 

This comparison comes up in nearly every CRM evaluation, and there isn’t a universal winner; the right platform depends on what a company already uses and how complex its processes need to be. 

Who Uses Microsoft Dynamics 365? (Industry & Company-Size Fit) 

Dynamics 365 is used across a wide range of industries, but a few patterns show up consistently: 

• Manufacturing and distribution: Supply Chain Management and Finance for production planning, inventory accuracy, and multi-entity reporting. 
• Field-service-heavy industries (utilities, equipment maintenance, facilities): Field Service for scheduling and work-order management. 
• Professional and financial services: Sales and Customer Service for pipeline visibility and client relationship management.  
• Small and mid-sized businesses: Business Central as an all-in-one ERP without enterprise-level complexity or cost. 
• Enterprise organizations: Full-suite deployments combining CRM and ERP apps with custom Power Platform extensions. 
• Nonprofits: CRM apps adapted for donor and grant management; see ERP for Nonprofits: A Comprehensive Overview, Donor Cultivation for Nonprofits. 

How to Choose the Right Dynamics 365 Modules 

Most businesses over-scope their first Dynamics 365 purchase. A more reliable approach is to work backward from the specific problem being solved: 

1. Identify the pain point first: find out what the challenge is that your business faces. From inventory accuracy to manual financial close, and slow resolution of issues, what are your pain points? 
2. Find out your current tech stack: using rigorous Microsoft 365 strengthens the case for Dynamics 365 over a non-Microsoft alternative. 
3. Check attach pricing before bundling: if a second or third app is needed within the first year, factor attach discounts into the total cost comparison rather than pricing each app in isolation. 
4. Separate “need now” from “need eventually”: Dataverse means additional apps can be layered in later without re-platforming, so there’s rarely a reason to buy every module on day one. 
5. Loop in an implementation partner early: for anything beyond a single CRM app, a certified partner can flag licensing traps and integration gaps before they become expensive to fix. 

AI, Copilot, and intelligent capabilities  

Copilot in Dynamics 365 apps helps users connect data with Teams and MS Outlook. As it offers no-code tools, even people with non-tech background can automate workflows, build apps and enhance productivity. D365 platforms are backed by built-in AI, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things, which ensures your organization is agile and future-ready. Using Copilot Studio, you can create custom agents and make faster decisions for every department.   

Related Reading: 

• Microsoft Dynamics Copilot – The First AI-Powered CRM System 

• How is Copilot in Business Central Transforming ERP with AI? 

• AI Agents in Business Central: ERP Automation and Insights. 

Final Takeaway   

Microsoft Dynamics 365 isn’t one product, it’s a modular suite of CRM and ERP applications built on a shared data platform, which is exactly what makes it flexible enough for a 40-person business and a multinational enterprise alike.  

The apps that matter most depend entirely on where the operational pain actually is: sales visibility, service response time, field logistics, or financial reporting. Pricing and licensing are the parts most businesses get wrong, so it’s worth confirming current rates and attaching eligibility before committing to a rollout. 

Beyond Key has been helping global customers with implementing, integrating, and customizing the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform with minimal disruption. We have been doing this since 2 decades.  

We developed custom-built CRM tailored to specific mission-driven interests of CGIAR. Using the CRM the non-profit was able to execute better levels of service, reduce internal costs, make smarter decisions, and increase the level of resources going directly to beneficiaries. You can download the case study here.  

Frequently Asked Questions 

The post What Is Microsoft Dynamics 365? A Complete Guide to Modules, Pricing, and Use Cases appeared first on Beyond Key.

What does supply and installation of an agentic AI automation system involve? 

When we supply and install an agentic AI automation system with RPA integration, you get a working stack, not a stack of licenses. That means the infrastructure it runs on, the reasoning layer where the AI agents actually plan and make decisions, the connectors that link them into your line of business systems, and the orchestration that lets those agents trigger your existing RPA bots, keep an eye on them, and step in when something goes wrong. 

If you have arrived here from a tender or an RFP line item, that phrase is doing a lot of work. Here is what sits underneath it. 

Agentic AI and RPA are not the same thing 

RPA is deterministic. A bot follows a recorded path: log into a portal, copy a value, paste it into an ERP screen, close. Change the screen layout and the bot breaks. 

Agentic AI is goal driven. You give an agent an objective such as “reconcile this batch of supplier invoices and flag anything outside tolerance”, and it decides which steps to run, in what order, using which tools. When something unexpected appears, it reasons about it instead of failing. 

The important conclusion: you do not rip out RPA to adopt agentic AI. You put agents above the bots. Agents become the supervisor. Bots remain the cheap, reliable hands. This is also where Beyond Key’s own delivery history started — our Power Automate–based RPA practice has been running since 2022, which is precisely why the agent layer gets built on top of that estate rather than around it. 

Reference architecture in plain language 

A production ready system usually has six layers. 

1. Interaction layer.Where people meet the system: Microsoft Teams, a web portal, Outlook, or a panel embedded inside Dynamics 365.
2. Agent and orchestration layer.The reasoning core, where agents are defined and given tools,memory and rules about what they may do unsupervised. Common building blocks include Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio. 

See Microsoft’s Agent Factory design patterns series for the underlying architecture patterns. 

3. Tool and connector layer.APIs, database and Power Platform connectors, ERP and CRM endpoints, document intelligence services, search indexes. This is what turns a chatbot into a system that does work.
4. RPA execution layer.Your existing estate: Power Automate Desktop, UiPath, Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Agents callbots as tools and read back their results. 
5. Data and knowledge layer.Vector indexes, document stores, SharePoint libraries, data warehouses. Grounding lives here. Without it, agent output is guesswork.
6. Governance,observabilityand security layer. Identity, role-based access, audit logging, prompt and response tracing, cost monitoring, human approval gates. 

Skip layer six and you will pass the pilot and fail the audit. 

What should the scope of supply include? 

If you are writing or answering a tender, this is the checklist worth insisting on. 

• Licenses for the AI platform, orchestration tooling and RPA runtimes, with term and true up mechanism stated 
• Environment provisioning with dev, test and production separation 
• Identity and secrets configuration: single sign on, service principals, key vault 
• Agent design artefacts: role definitions, system instructions, tool catalogue, escalation rules 
• Connectors for each named source system, plus wrappers so existing RPA processes can be invoked and observed by agents 
• Knowledge grounding setup, including document ingestion, chunking and indexing 
• Test evidence: unit, integration, user acceptance and a documented accuracy baseline 
• Monitoring dashboards for usage, cost, failure rate and human intervention rate 
• Documentation, admin runbook and named user training 
• Hypercare period and a support SLA with response and resolution targets 

Anything missing from that list becomes a change request later, usually at a worse price. 

How is the system installed and deployed? 

Most programmes follow five phases. Timelines hinge on the number of processes, the state of your data and the speed of your approvals. Treat any duration as planning guidance, not a commitment. 

Phase 1: Discovery and process selection. Score candidate processes on volume, exception rate, business value and data readiness. Pick two or three for the first release. Resist the urge to start with the hardest process in the business. 

Phase 2: Environment build. Provision tenants, configure identity, set up landing zones, connect source systems in a sandbox, establish CI/CD for agent and bot artefacts. 

Phase 3: Agent build and RPA wiring. Define each agent’s role, tools and guardrails. Wrap existing bots as callable actions. Build the human in the loop approval points. Ground the agents in real documents and records. 

Phase 4: Testing and tuning. Run a golden dataset through the system, measure accuracy and escalation behavior, then tune instructions, retrieval and thresholds. Quality is created here. 

Phase 5: Go live and support. Deploy to production, then run in shadow mode alongside your existing operations wherever the risk is high and cut over once the results hold up. From there it is daily monitoring and weekly tuning. 

Client work 

Zero-Touch, Agentic AI Accounts Payable Platform: US Manufacturing Enterprise 

This is the accounts payable scenario in practice: Beyond Key built an agentic AI automation platform for a US-based manufacturing client to move invoice processing toward zero-touch — agents handling capture, validation, and exception routing across the AP workflow, with the existing automation estate wired in rather than replaced. 

Download the case study: Beyond Key case study — Zero-Touch, Agentic AI Accounts Payable Platform.  

How does agentic AI integrate with an existing RPA estate? 

Three integration patterns cover most real deployments.

Agent calls bot. The agent decides a task is routine and hands it to a bot. Cheapest and most common. Good for data entry, portal downloads and legacy systems with no API. 

Bot calls agent. An existing bot hits something unstructured, an email, a scanned PDF, a free text note, and passes it to an agent for interpretation before continuing. The fastest way to add value without redesigning anything. 

Agent supervises a bot fleet. The agent monitors queues, diagnoses failures, retries with corrected input and escalates with a written explanation. Operational savings usually show up here, because bot maintenance is a recurring cost. 

Governance is a delivery requirement, not an afterthought 

Ask the following before signing anything. 

• Which actions can an agent take without human approval, and where is that list maintained? 
• Is every agent decision logged with inputs, tools used and outputs, in a form an auditor can read? 
• How is personal and regulated data masked or excluded from prompts? 
• What is the cost ceiling per process, and what happens when it is breached? 
• How do you roll back an agent version that behaves differently after a model update? 
• Who owns the prompts, agent definitions and integration code at the end of the contract? 

That last question matters more than most buyers realize. 

Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. 

Source: Gartner 

How to evaluate a supplier 

There are four things a shortlist should test for. Engineering depth in the stack you have chosen, proven by work that went to production rather than to a demo environment. Integration history with your own ERP, CRM and document systems. A governance model you can look at, not a slide about one. And a support arrangement that is still held in the first quarter after go live, which is when the awkward cases show up. 

Modernizing automation does not have to mean starting over.

Beyond Key is a Chicago headquartered Microsoft Solutions Partner covering Azure AI, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Our automation teams build agentic systems around your existing RPA, so you keep the bots that still do their job and add a reasoning layer above them. Related engagements include AI-powered import shipping document automation and an Azure OpenAI–based chatbot for a Chicago pharma company’s data access, both of which share the same agent-plus-connector architecture described above. 

Clients we have served across the globe: Szul.com, QSC Audio, Costa Mesa, CA, USA,  CGIAR System Organization and many Fortune 500 companies.  

Modernizing automation does not have to mean starting over. 

If you’re scoping an agentic AI and RPA integration project, Beyond Key’s automation team can walk through your existing bot estate, your source systems, and where a reasoning layer would actually pay for itself. 

Talk to our automation team → 

Frequently asked questions

What is an agentic AI Automation system? It is an automation platform where AI agents receive a goal, plan the steps, call tools and bots to execute them, handle exceptions using reasoning, and escalate to a person when confidence or authority runs out. 

Do we need to replace our existing RPA bots? No. In most deployments the bots are kept and wrapped as tools the agents can call. Replacement is usually only worth considering for bots that break constantly because the underlying application changes often. 

How long does installation take? It depends on process count, data readiness and approval speed. A focused first release covering two or three processes is typically measured in weeks. Enterprise-wide rollouts run in successive releases rather than a single cutover. 

What infrastructure is required? Most organizations run the agent layer in the cloud and keep RPA runtimes wherever the target applications live, which is often on premises or on virtual desktops. Hybrid is the normal answer. 

How is accuracy measured? Through a golden dataset of representative cases with known correct outcomes, scored before going live and re-scored after every meaningful change. Track escalation rate and human correction rate alongside raw accuracy. 

Is our data used to train the model? With enterprise services on Azure and comparable platforms, customer data is not used to train foundation models. Confirm this contractually and confirm data residency at the same time.

The post Supply and Installation of an Agentic AI Automation System with RPA Integration  appeared first on Beyond Key.

Introduction  

Most organizations’ attack surfaces have widened with cloud adoption. Within minutes, all sensitive information can be exposed because of one misconfiguration. Many penetration testing firms, however, are still using methods that are developed for traditional on-premise networks. To close the divide, you must choose a cloud provider who has a proven track record of cloud expertise. This guide tells you exactly what to look for.  

What Is a Cloud Penetration Testing Company?  

A cloud penetration testing firm will attempt to hack into your cloud system using real-world attacks, before malicious hackers attempt to do so, with your permission. Typically, this involves discovering weak identity and access management settings, unsecured storage, misconfigured cloud services, and misaligned security solutions between your organization’s internal security and the security solutions you are provided by the cloud platform.  

This work is very different from traditional network penetration testing, which generally focuses on physical servers, firewalls, and internal office infrastructure. The model on which the cloud operates is quite different. Identity and access management, shared infrastructure, and automated services are big parts of what they do, so they need a different testing approach and skill set.  

A competent provider should have practical experience with the leading cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as a lot of organizations use more than one.  

Why the Right Choice Matters  

Choosing the wrong provider isn’t just a waste of budget. It can have meaningful security gaps in place and at the same time, it can create a false sense of assurance within the organization.   

A well-qualified partner benefits your organization by:  

• Discovering weaknesses before the hackers do 
• Minimizing the risk and impact of an expensive data breach 
• More efficient support of compliance requirements 
• Building trust with customers, partners and regulators 
• Reducing remediation costs by identifying problems early 
• Increasing overall confidence in your cloud security posture  

Traditional Penetration Testing vs. Cloud Penetration Testing 

7 Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Penetration Testing Company  

1. Cloud-First Knowledge 

Inquire with the provider directly about the amount of hands-on experience they have with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Each platform may offer different services, settings, and default configuration, so may have strengths on one platform and weaknesses on another. Cloud providers operate based on the Shared Responsibility Model: the provider is responsible for the underlying infrastructure; your organization is responsible for the configuration and utilization of the services.  

2. Check Industry Certifications 

One of the simplest ways to assure a minimum level of skill is through certifications. Seek out certifications like CREST, OSCP, OSCE, CISSP, CEH, and cloud-based certifications, like AWS Security Specialty. While these do not necessarily indicate good work, they demonstrate that the provider has been assessed against a known standard and maintains an up-to-date approach to a changing subject area. Certifications are just one of several considerations and should not be the determining factor when selecting a provider. 

3. Take Their Testing Methodology into Account  

Inquire about their methodology and the frameworks they follow like OWASP Testing Guide, NIST guidelines, PTES, or MITRE ATT&CK. These exist for the sake of consistency in testing and thoroughness. Also, it would be helpful to know the percentage of manual versus automated work. While automated tools are helpful for general coverage, an experienced tester is likely to uncover real problems that automated tools will fail to detect. 

4. Consider Experience in the Field 

A provider who has actually worked in your field, such as healthcare, finance, SaaS, manufacturing, or even government, brings one thing automated tools can’t: context. They know what kinds of risks are likely to appear in your particular environment, as well as how the rules affect you and what the limitations are. Often this familiarity comes through in the quality of the findings because the team already knows what to look for and why it is important. 

5. Reporting and Remediation Assistance

A good report isn’t just a list of problems. It should contain an executive summary geared to leaders, unambiguous risk ratings, and the detail that your engineering team can react to. For each vulnerability, there should be evidence of their possible use, rather than just an assertion. Equally significant, the report ought to offer your team the fix step-by-step so remediation is not a guessing game. 

6. Understand Compliance Capabilities 

Be sure that the testing conforms to a standard such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or GDPR, not that it is “supposed to be” compliant. If the assessment matches what the auditors would be looking for, it can be very helpful to ease the burden during formal assessment and minimize back-and-forth communication afterwards. 

7. Find Out More About Their Reputation, Case Studies, and Client Reviews 

It’s a provider’s track record that tells you a lot. Search for genuine client feedback, case studies, industry acknowledgements, and indications of ongoing client associations. A provider with a strong confidence in their work is likely to be able to provide references or track record. If you don’t see any signs of commitment on this side or if they give you any vague answers when you ask them to provide evidence, take note. 

Top 9 Cloud Penetration Testing Companies 

9. Redscan 

Redscan is best known as a managed detection and response provider, with penetration testing offered as an add-on, rather than as a core specialty. They have cloud testing capabilities, but the company’s focus and resources are more suited to continuous monitoring and threat detection. This can mean less specialized depth for organizations that specifically prioritize deep, cloud-native penetration testing, compared to firms built around offensive security alone. 

8. TrustedSec

TrustedSec are well known in the offensive security consulting space, providing a full range of services from red teaming, incident response through to security program development. They have well-known consultants in the industry and technically the firm is seen as rigorous. That being said, cloud-specific testing is only a part of a much bigger portfolio, so clients looking for just cloud expertise may find it not the primary focus of the engagement. 

7. Praetorian

Praetorian is primarily working with large enterprises and is known for advanced adversarial simulation and offensive security research. The company has a good technical reputation and has made significant contributions to the security research community . However, their engagement model and pricing tends to be geared towards larger organizations, making them less accessible for small and mid-size businesses. 

6. Coalfire 

Compliance-driven security assessments are a popular choice for Coalfire, especially for companies in regulated industries such as finance and health care. They are great at testing against audit and certification requirements and are a go-to for compliance-first engagements. The extent of manual, cloud specific testing will vary from engagement to engagement based on scope and the assigned assessor.

5. Rhino Security Labs 

Through public research, Rhino Security Labs has built a strong technical reputation around AWS and cloud-specific research and has contributed to the security community. The testers are known for finding truly novel cloud misconfigurations and attack paths. However, some clients have noted that reporting depth and post-engagement remediation support may be inconsistent across projects.

4. Astra Security 

Astra Security has positioned itself as a budget-friendly option for startups and mid-sized companies with a mix of automated scanning and manual testing at a lower price point. That makes it attractive to teams with smaller budgets or security programs that are earlier in their maturity.  The downside is that engagements may rely more on automated tooling than fully manual, enterprise-grade testing approaches.

3. Cobalt.io 

Cobalt.io is a pentest-as-a-service platform that utilizes a distributed network of freelance testers, assigned per engagement. This method gives companies that conduct frequent, smaller-scope tests faster turnarounds and scheduling flexibility. The tradeoff is that continuity can suffer, as each time a different tester may be assigned, making it more difficult to achieve deep, ongoing familiarity with a client’s environment. 

2. Beyond Key

Beyond Key doesn’t have a generic, one-size-fits-all process for cloud security but a deliberate hands-on approach with platform expertise in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The team holds industry certifications such as OSCP, CEH, and CISSP, as well as cloud-specific credentials like AWS Security Specialty, giving clients a verified skill baseline behind every engagement. Testing is done using established frameworks such as OWASP, NIST, and MITRE ATT&CK, and is more reliant on manual testing than an automated scan to do the work. The firm has also acquired real-world cross-industry experience in healthcare, finance and SaaS, as well as practical experience with compliance standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and PCI DSS. 

Main features: 

• Framework-driven manual-first testing 
• Cloud Security Team – Specialized and Certified 
• Actionable reports with clear steps for remediation 
• Retesting standard included 
• Robust compliance alignment (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS) 
• Team’s continuous support throughout engagements 

1. Fox Bishop

Bishop Fox is consistently ranked among the world’s top offensive security firms, attracting the best security talent and performing deep, manual, and rigorous engagements. Their research team has a solid public record of vulnerability discoveries and industry recognition. That kind of depth typically comes at a premium price and requires longer timelines to engage, which could be a consideration for smaller organizations or teams that require a quicker turnaround. 

Final Checklist for Choosing the Right Cloud Penetration Testing Company  

Before signing a contract, confirm that the provider offers:  

• Proven cloud platform expertise 
• Certified, experienced security professionals 
• A combination of manual and automated testing 
• Relevant industry experience 
• Strong compliance knowledge 
• Detailed, actionable reporting 
• Remediation support 
• Verifiable, positive client references 
• Transparent, clear pricing 
• Retesting included in the engagement  

Conclusion  

Don’t base your decision on price when choosing a cloud penetration testing company. That is, balancing expertise, methodology, and a real concern for long-term security outcomes. Use the checklist and questions in this guide to objectively evaluate providers and weed out vendors who can’t clearly and confidently answer them.  

Security protecting cloud resources isn’t a project; it’s a duty. The perfect testing partner is the extension of your team, that brings added value beyond the engagement. 

Frequently Asked Questions

The post 10 Best Cloud Penetration Testing Companies to Consider in 2026 appeared first on Beyond Key.

The best Microsoft Dynamics Business Central partners in 2026 combine certified Microsoft expertise with hands-on implementation experience, industry-specific know-how, and support that continues well past go-live. Beyond Key leads this list for 2026, followed by established names such as Velosio, ArcherPoint, Western Computer, Encore Business Solutions, Dynamics Square, BDO Digital, Hitachi Solutions, Columbus, and Avanade. 

Picking an ERP platform is only half the decision. The other half is picking who implements it. Business Central is a capable, flexible cloud ERP, but a rushed configuration, a sloppy data migration, or a partner that disappears after go-live can turn a promising ERP investment into a daily source of friction. 

This guide walks through what a Microsoft Business Central partner actually does, ranks ten partners worth evaluating in 2026, and lays out the criteria, mistakes, and questions that matter most when you’re choosing one. 

Our content is supported by verifiable credentials such as: 

• Microsoft publications  
• Strong client relationships 
• Proven track record of success  
• Industry-leading expertise 
• 200+ implementations 

What Does a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner Do? 

A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner is a Microsoft-certified consulting firm that implements, configures, migrates data into, customizes, and supports Business Central environments for client organizations. Unlike a reseller who simply sells licenses, a true implementation partner is involved in the full lifecycle: discovery, configuration, data migration, integration, training, and ongoing optimization. 

In practice, that work typically includes: 

• Requirements discovery and fit-gap analysis against your current processes 
• Configuring financial, inventory, sales, purchasing, and (where relevant) manufacturing modules 
• Migrating historical data from legacy ERP systems, spreadsheets, or accounting software 
• Building integrations with Microsoft 365, Power BI, Power Platform, and third-party systems 
• Developing custom extensions for workflows Business Central doesn’t handle out of the box 
• Training end users and managing organizational change around the new system 
• Providing post-go-live support, monitoring, and continuous improvement 

A capable partner translates your business model into a working ERP configuration, and they stay involved long enough to help you get real value out of it. 

Embark on your Business Central Implementation Journey today.  

How We Evaluated These Business Central Partners 

This list was built around criteria that consistently separate strong implementations from troubled ones: depth of Microsoft Dynamics certification, breadth of Business Central-specific project experience, industry specialization, data migration track record, integration capability, training and change management approach, and the strength of post-go-live support.  

We also looked at how transparently each partner communicates scope, timelines, and pricing, a factor that matters more to long-term satisfaction than most buyers expect going in. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partners Comparison Table 

Top 10 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partners in 2026 

Beyond Key

Headquarters: Chicago, United States  

Best for: Organizations that want a Microsoft-focused partner combining deep Business Central expertise with broader Microsoft cloud, data, and AI capabilities under one roof. 

Beyond Key has built its Business Central practice around a principle that’s easy to state and hard to execute: implementation should be shaped around how a business actually runs, not the other way around.  

As a Microsoft-focused consulting firm, Beyond Key brings certified Business Central consultants who handle the full implementation lifecycle: discovery, configuration, data migration, integration, and training plus post-live support.   

For finance and operations teams that eventually want real-time dashboards, automated workflows, or AI-assisted reporting layered on top of their ERP, that connected expertise removes a step most partners can’t offer in-house. 

Key strengths: 

• Certified Business Central consultants with full-lifecycle implementation experience 
• Strong complementary expertise in Power BI, Power Platform, and Microsoft Fabric for organizations that want integrated reporting and automation 
• Structured data migration methodology covering mapping, cleansing, validation, and cutover 
• Flexible engagement models suited to both new implementations and Business Central re-implementations 
• Responsive post-go-live support model built around long-term system evolution, not one-time delivery 

Considerations: Like most specialized Microsoft partners, the best engagements happen when scope and priorities are defined clearly upfront — a discovery conversation is worth the time before signing anything. 

Why Beyond Key stands out: What sets Beyond Key apart in a crowded partner landscape is the breadth surrounding its Business Central work. Because the company also runs deep practices in Power BI, Power Platform, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure data services, clients get an implementation partner that can connect Business Central to a genuinely modern data and reporting environment rather than leaving it as an isolated system.  

Velosio 

Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia 

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise organizations looking for a long-established Dynamics-focused partner with packaged implementation accelerators. 

Velosio has been in the Dynamics ERP space for years and has built a reputation around structured, repeatable delivery methods. The firm offers accelerators designed to speed up common implementation patterns, which can shorten timelines for organizations with relatively standard requirements. 

Key strengths: Long Dynamics tenure, packaged implementation patterns, broad geographic coverage across North America. 

Considerations: As with any larger partner, it’s worth confirming which specific team and consultants will be staffed on your project. 

ArcherPoint 

Headquarters in: Raleigh, USA 

Best for: Organizations running complex upgrades or migrating from legacy Dynamics NAV systems into Business Central. 

ArcherPoint has carved out a specialization in Business Central specifically, rather than treating it as one ERP among many. The firm is frequently chosen for NAV-to-Business-Central upgrade projects, where deep platform-specific knowledge of legacy data structures genuinely matters. 

Key strengths: Deep Business Central specialization, strong legacy migration and upgrade experience, Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications. 

Considerations: Best suited to organizations whose primary need is Business Central itself rather than a wider multi-product Microsoft transformation. 

Western Computer 

Headquarters in: California, USA 

Best for: Manufacturing, distribution, and retail businesses seeking industry-specific Business Central configurations. 

Western Computer builds vertical-specific solutions on top of Business Central, reducing the customization burden for manufacturing and distribution companies that need industry workflows from day one. 

Key strengths: Strong vertical specialization, pre-built industry extensions, experienced project teams for operationally complex environments. 

Considerations: Organizations outside its core verticals may get less out of the pre-built industry tooling. 

Encore Business Solutions 

Headquarters in: Manitoba, Canada  

Best for: Mid-sized organizations in Canada and the U.S. seeking a partner with depth across ERP, CRM, and business intelligence. 

Encore offers Business Central alongside CRM and BI services, suiting organizations that want ERP, customer data, and reporting handled under one coordinated roadmap. 

Key strengths: Cross-functional ERP/CRM/BI expertise, established presence across Canada and the U.S., mid-market focus. 

Considerations: Full-service transformation projects are typically scoped and priced individually, so timelines and costs should be confirmed early. 

Dynamics Square 

Headquartered in: Haryana, India  

Best for: Organizations seeking flexible engagement models and cost-conscious implementation support. 

Dynamics Square positions itself as a practical alternative for companies that want Business Central implemented efficiently without an enterprise-scale price tag, covering implementation, customization, integration, and support through adaptable engagement models. 

Key strengths: Flexible, cost-aware engagement structures, end-to-end service coverage, multi-industry experience. 

Considerations: Organizations planning very large, multi-region rollouts may want to confirm global delivery capacity directly. 

BDO Digital 

Headquarters in: Indianapolis 

Best for: Finance-driven organizations that want ERP implementation paired with governance and compliance expertise. 

BDO’s digital practice leans on the firm’s broader advisory background, making it relevant where financial governance, reporting structure, and compliance alignment are central to the rollout. 

Key strengths: Strong financial and regulatory advisory background, structured governance approach, established brand credibility. 

Considerations: Organizations with heavy operational or manufacturing complexity should confirm the assigned team has matching operational expertise, not just financial-systems depth. 

Hitachi Solutions 

Headquarters in: Tokyo, Japan 

Best for: Enterprises wanting a globally recognized partner with mature, large-scale delivery frameworks. 

Hitachi Solutions brings broad Dynamics delivery experience and structured methodology suited to larger environments where governance and scalability matter from day one. 

Key strengths: Global delivery footprint, mature project frameworks, strong Microsoft ecosystem credibility. 

Considerations: The scale of delivery infrastructure may be more than smaller Business Central projects require. 

Columbus 

Headquarters in: Hyderabad, India 

Best for: Multi-location or international businesses needing scalable, cross-border Business Central deployments. 

Columbus operates globally and has coordinated multi-entity Business Central rollouts across regions, suiting organizations whose ERP needs span more than one country. 

Key strengths: International delivery capacity, multi-entity deployment experience, broad industry exposure. 

Considerations: Confirm that the proposed delivery model matches your specific Business Central scope rather than a heavier enterprise-transformation framework. 

Avanade 

Headquarters in: Washington, USA 

Best for: Large enterprises running Business Central as one part of a broader Microsoft cloud and Power Platform transformation. 

Avanade connects ERP deployment to broader initiatives across security, analytics, and enterprise architecture, which is especially relevant when Business Central is one piece of a larger Microsoft ecosystem strategy. 

Key strengths: Deep enterprise Microsoft ecosystem expertise, strong integration and architecture capability, mature large-scale delivery approach. 

Considerations: The enterprise-oriented delivery model may carry more overhead than smaller organizations need. 

• Read more about Business Central Consulting and request a free consultation.  

What to Expect from a Strong Business Central Implementation Partner 

Regardless of which partner you choose, certain services should be non-negotiable parts of the engagement. 

Discovery and fit-gap analysis: Before any configuration begins, a serious partner spends real time understanding your current processes, pain points, and reporting needs then maps those requirements honestly against what Business Central can and can’t do out of the box. 

Structured data migration: Moving historical data from spreadsheets, legacy ERPs, or accounting platforms is one of the most common points of ERP project failure. A reliable partner follows a defined process: mapping source data, cleansing it, running test imports, validating results, and only then executing final cutover. 

Integration planning: Business Central rarely operates in isolation. Most organizations need it connected to Microsoft 365, Power BI for reporting, Power Platform for automation, and often third-party systems like e-commerce platforms or banking tools. Planning these integrations early avoids expensive rework later. 

Training built into the timeline, not bolted onto the end: ERP value depends entirely on adoption. Partners who treat training as a checkbox at the end of the project, rather than a structured part of the rollout tend to see lower usage and more support tickets after go-live. 

Support that continues after go-live: Go-live is the start of operational maturity, not the finish line. The strongest partners stay engaged afterward: refining configurations, adding reporting capabilities, and helping the system evolve as the business changes. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 named a Leader in three Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports: Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, and Cloud ERP Finance. 

Read the Report.  

Criteria for Choosing the Right Business Central Partner 

With dozens of certified partners in the market, the goal isn’t finding the biggest name, it’s finding the one whose strengths match your situation. These factors matter most: 

1. Proven Business Central specialization, not just general Dynamics familiarity
2. Industry experience across multiple industries. 
3. A clear implementation methodology, from phases to deliverables, and governance
4. Strong project management and communication practices throughout the engagement
5. Demonstrated data migration expertise, with a real process for mapping and validation
6. Integration capability across the Microsoft ecosystem and other tools
7. A training and change management approach, not an afterthought
8. A clear support model, including response times, escalation paths, and service-level expectations
9. Transparency factor: Partners who are upfront about limitations tend to manage projects more honestly
10. A long-term improvement mindset, since the best partners keep adding value well after the initial rollout 

Don’t Make These Mistakes While Hiring a Business Central Partner 

Even strong ERP platforms underperform when the partner selection process is rushed. The most common missteps include: 

• Don’t choose the vendor with the lowest price: The lowest bid often leads to scope gaps, change requests, and rework that costs more than the savings. 
• Skipping discovery: Without a proper fit-gap analysis, scope ambiguity surfaces midway through the project, usually at the worst possible time. 
• Underestimating training: A system nobody uses correctly doesn’t deliver value, no matter how well it was configured. 
• Leaving integrations as an afterthought: Connecting Business Central to reporting tools, sales systems, or automation platforms is far cheaper to plan early than to retrofit later. 
• Treating go-live as the finish line: Organizations that stop engaging their partner after launch tend to leave significant ERP value unrealized. 

Questions to Ask Before Signing with a Business Central Partner 

A short, direct conversation can reveal more than a glossy proposal. Worth asking: 

1. What does your implementation methodology look like, phase by phase?
2. Who will be staffed on our project and what’s their Business Central experience?
3. What’s included in go-live support, and what happens after that period ends?
4. How do you handle scope changes and change requests?
5. What’s your approach to user training and adoption?
6. How do you migrate and validate data from our current system?
7. Can you support Power BI dashboards and broaden Microsoft reporting needs?
8. How do you handle integration with Microsoft 365 and third-party platforms?
9. What do your ongoing support hours, SLAs, and escalation paths look like?
10. How do you help clients optimize Business Central after the initial implementation? 

Final Thoughts 

Business Central can genuinely transform how a company manages finance, inventory, and operations. But the platform’s potential is only as good as the team implementing it. Beyond Key’s combination of certified Business Central expertise and broader Microsoft data and automation capability makes it a strong starting point for organizations evaluating partners in 2026, particularly those who want their ERP connected to a modern reporting and analytics environment rather than left as a standalone system. 

Whichever partner you ultimately choose, the criteria stay the same: clear methodology, real data migration expertise, integration capability, structured training, and support that doesn’t disappear once the system goes live. Get those right, and Business Central becomes the operational backbone it was designed to be. 

Looking for digital transformation with Microsoft Dynamics 365?  

Beyond Key is one of the trusted global Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners that have catered to multiple businesses across all industries. We have been serving Fortune 500 companies since last 20 years. To know more, you can click here.  

Real-life D365 Business Central projects of Beyond Key  

US-based Paints and Coating Manufacturing company Fenix implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 to automate customer support using a custom-built CRM. 

Download the case study!  

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. What does a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner do? 

 A Business Central partner implements, configures, migrates data into, and supports Dynamics 365 Business Central for client organizations. This covers discovery, configuration, data migration, integrations, user training, and ongoing optimization after go-live. 

2. Do I need a partner to implement Business Central, or can I do it myself? 

While Business Central can technically be self-configured, most organizations lack the in-house expertise to handle data migration, integrations, and industry-specific configuration correctly. A certified partner significantly reduces implementation risk and shortens time to value. 

3. Are all Business Central partners Microsoft-certified?

 Reputable implementation partners hold Microsoft Solutions Partner designations, often specifically for Business Applications. It’s worth confirming certification status directly, since not every company offering “Business Central services” holds current Microsoft credentials. 

4. How do I choose between multiple qualified Business Central partners? 

Compare them against consistent criteria: industry experience, data migration track record, integration capability, training approach, and post-go-live support model — rather than company size or brand recognition alone. 

5. What’s the difference between a Business Central partner and a reseller? 

A reseller primarily sells Business Central licenses. An implementation partner does the actual configuration, data migration, customization, training, and support work that determines whether the ERP investment succeeds. 

6. How much does a Business Central implementation typically cost? 

Costs vary significantly based on company size, data complexity, and customization needs, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars for straightforward mid-market deployments to substantially more for complex, multi-entity rollouts. Most partners scope and price projects individually after a discovery conversation. 

The post 10 Best Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partners to Consider in 2026 appeared first on Beyond Key.

What CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs need to know before committing capital to a data and AI platform.

Quick Answer 

Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics solve different problems. Databricks is an open, multi-cloud Lakehouse built for AI, machine learning, and complex data engineering at scale. Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft’s SQL-first data warehousing service, tightly integrated with Power BI, but Microsoft has stopped meaningful new investment in Synapse and is directing customers toward Microsoft Fabric, its unified successor platform. The right choice in 2026 depends less on “which is better” and more on three questions: how AI-dependent is your roadmap, how committed are you to the Microsoft stack, and how much platform risk can your board tolerate.

Executive Summary 

Every data platform decision is ultimately a capital allocation decision. The technical differences between Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics matter to your engineering teams; the strategic and financial differences are what matter in the boardroom.

This brief distills that decision into three dimensions that executives consistently underweight in vendor-led comparisons:

1. Microsoft has confirmed that new feature investment is concentrated in Microsoft Fabric, not Synapse. Choosing Synapse today is choosing a platform Microsoft is actively migrating its own customers away from.
2. Boards are no longer asking “can we build a dashboard?”; they are asking “can we deploy AI agents safely on governed data?” This single question now decides more platform votes than price or familiarity.

The short version: if your competitive advantage increasingly depends on AI, machine learning, and the ability to operate across multiple clouds, Databricks is the platform built for that future. If your needs are SQL-centric reporting tightly bound to the Microsoft ecosystem and you are prepared to plan an eventual move to Microsoft Fabric, Synapse remains workable in the near term, but it is no longer where new strategic investment should go.

What Are Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics? 

Databricks: The Open Data Intelligence Platform 

What is Databricks? Databricks is a unified, cloud-agnostic platform built on Apache Spark, organized around the Lakehouse architecture, a design that combines the low-cost, flexible storage of a data lake with the governance and performance guarantees of a data warehouse. Rather than maintaining separate systems for data engineering, business intelligence, data science, and machine learning, Databricks unifies all four on one governed copy of data.

The platform runs natively on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, so it is not tied to any single hyperscaler’s roadmap. Data is stored in Delta Lake, an open table format, inside the customer’s own cloud account, not inside Databricks-controlled infrastructure. For executives, this single fact has outsized importance: it preserves negotiating leverage and reduces switching costs, because your data remains in an open, portable format regardless of which compute engine you choose to run on top of it.

Azure Synapse Analytics: Microsoft’s Integrated Data Warehouse 

Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft’s integrated analytics service, combining enterprise data warehousing, big data processing, and data integration pipelines inside a single workspace called Synapse Studio. It was built to bring together SQL-based data warehousing (via Dedicated and Serverless SQL Pools) and Apache Spark-based big data processing under one roof, with tight native integration into Power BI, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Azure Machine Learning.

Synapse has historically been the natural choice for organizations with SQL-trained teams who needed enterprise-grade data warehousing without leaving the Microsoft ecosystem. That positioning, however, has shifted a point we address directly in Section 3, because it changes the calculus for any new investment decision made in 2026.

Note: Microsoft’s own modernization messaging is unambiguous: Fabric is positioned as the successor platform, consolidating Synapse, Power BI, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Lake into a single SaaS environment built on a shared storage layer called OneLake.

Side-by-Side Comparison: Architecture, Cost, and Capability 

The table below summarizes the dimensions that matter most to executive decision-makers. It is designed to be the one table your board needs.

Sources: Nucleus Research

Core Purpose

The purpose of Azure Synapse is to consolidate enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics into a single service. It is ideal for reporting, business intelligence, and structured data-related processes and tasks.

Databricks: Built around Apache Spark, Databricks is a unified data platform focused on data engineering, data science, and machine learning, suitable for large-scale processing and real-time analytics.

AI and Machine Learning Readiness

By 2026, the question boards that ask data leaders have fundamentally changed. It is no longer “can we report on our data”, it is “can we put AI agents into production safely on governed data, and how fast.” This is the dimension where the two platforms diverge most sharply.

Databricks’ Native AI Stack

• MLflow manages the full machine learning lifecycle: experiment tracking, model versioning, lineage to training data, and controlled promotion to production.
• Mosaic AI covers data preparation, training, serving, and monitoring as one connected workflow, with native support for PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Ray.
• Unity Catalog provides a single governance layer across all data assets, with automatic metadata collection and lineage tracking, a foundational requirement for deploying AI agents safely at enterprise scale.
• Foundation Model APIs and a dedicated Feature Store allow teams to build and reuse AI capabilities across departments rather than rebuilding them per project.

Synapse’s Approach

Azure Synapse connects out to Azure Machine Learning for model training and deployment. This works, but it requires wiring together separate services and moving data between them, an architecture pattern that adds integration overhead precisely where speed-to-production matters most for AI initiatives.

Collaboration

Azure Synapse: It offers limited collaboration capabilities compared to Databricks.

Databricks: Offers collaborative notebooks that support Python, R, Scala, and SQL, with version control and real-time co-authoring for teams.

Cost Considerations 

Azure Synapse offers more predictable pricing with its provisioned compute resources, which is advantageous for organizations with consistent workloads.

Databricks, on the other hand, charges based on compute usage, which can be cost-effective for organizations with fluctuating or high-intensity workloads, particularly when leveraging its real-time processing capabilities.

Use Cases  

Azure Synapse: Dashboard creation and reports, running serverless queries on raw files inside the Data Lake, consolidating structured data from multiple business systems into a centralized data warehouse.

Databricks: Data engineering and ETL, provides automated ML pipelines (AutoML) to train predictive models, process streaming data (e.g., IoT devices, financial transactions, log files) in real-time using Structured Streaming, etc.

You can also read our guide: Databricks vs. Snowflake or Databricks vs. MS Fabric

Decision Framework: Which Platform Fits Your Strategy? 

Choose Databricks If

• AI and machine learning are core to your competitive strategy over the next three to five years, not a side initiative.
• Your organization operates across more than one cloud provider, or wants to preserve that optionality.
• You need one governed platform for data engineering, analytics, and AI rather than several point tools with separate governance models.
• Your board is weighing platform decisions on a multi-year time horizon and wants documented, independently verified ROI.

Choose Azure Synapse If

• Your needs are primarily SQL-based reporting and business intelligence, tightly coupled to an existing Power BI deployment.
• You have well-performing existing Synapse workloads, and a migration is not yet operationally or financially justified.
• Your team’s skill set is deeply rooted in T-SQL and Microsoft tooling, and the lower learning curve is a genuine near-term productivity advantage.

Important caveat: if you select Synapse, do so with eyes open that Microsoft Fabric, not Synapse, is where the platform’s long-term roadmap is heading. Build your migration runway into the decision rather than treating Synapse as a permanent landing point.

The Hybrid Reality 

Many enterprises do not face a binary choice. A common and pragmatic pattern is to run Databricks for advanced analytics, data science, and ML, while keeping Synapse (or migrating to Fabric) for BI reporting teams already standardized on Power BI, using Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 as the shared storage layer and Microsoft Purview for governance across both. This lets different teams work in the tool suited to their skill set while avoiding duplicated data copies.

Final Thoughts 

Platform decisions of this scale are rarely reversed cheaply once made. The data in this brief points to a clear pattern: organizations whose strategy depends on AI, machine learning, and cross-cloud flexibility have a well-documented, independently verified financial case for Databricks. Organizations with narrower, SQL-centric, Microsoft-only needs can still use Synapse productively today but should treat it as a bridge, with Microsoft Fabric as the more durable long-term Microsoft-ecosystem destination.

The question for your next leadership offsite is not “which platform has more features.” It is: “where do we want our data and AI capability to be in three years, and which platform’s trajectory matches that ambition?”

Want Assistance in Databricks or Synapse Analytics Consulting Services?

Book a Strategic Call with Beyond Key!

Beyond Key is a global IT consulting service provider that has been providing end-to-end services to global clients from last 20 years. You can contact us to deep dive into data platforms. From guidance to implementation and post-deployment process, we are here to assist you at every step.

Trusted by Industry Leaders: Breg, Taymor, GROW, and more. You can read the case studies here.

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. Is Databricks more expensive than Azure Synapse Analytics?

Not necessarily on a total cost of ownership basis. Synapse’s per-TB serverless pricing can appear cheaper for narrow reporting workloads.

2. Is Microsoft discontinuing Azure Synapse Analytics?

Microsoft has not announced a full discontinuation of Azure Synapse Analytics, and existing workloads remain supported. However, new feature investment has been redirected to Microsoft Fabric, several Synapse-specific components and reference architectures have been formally deprecated, and Microsoft’s own messaging positions Fabric as the long-term successor platform.

3. Can Databricks and Azure Synapse be used together?

Yes. Both platforms can share the same Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 layer, allowing data engineers to transform data in Databricks and business analysts to query the processed output through Synapse SQL without duplicating data. This hybrid pattern is common during phased modernization.

4. Which platform is better for AI and machine learning workloads?

Databricks has a more mature, natively integrated AI stack, including MLflow, Mosaic AI, and Unity Catalog for governed lineage across all data assets. Synapse requires wiring together a separate Azure Machine Learning service, which adds integration overhead for AI-intensive workloads.

5. Should our organization migrate from Synapse to Microsoft Fabric or to Databricks?

It depends on your AI ambitions and cloud strategy. If your roadmap is Microsoft-centric and reporting-driven, Fabric is the more natural successor to Synapse. If your roadmap requires multi-cloud flexibility and deep AI/ML capability, Databricks is the stronger long-term foundation. Many enterprises evaluate both before committing capital.

The post Databricks vs. Azure Synapse Analytics: The 2026 Decision Guide appeared first on Beyond Key.

Selecting the wrong Microsoft Dynamics 365 consulting partner is expensive. Projects stall during data migration; user adoption collapses when change management is cut, or integrations break six months post-go-live when the original team has moved on. 

Forrester’s 2024 Total Economic Impact research found qualified Microsoft partners deliver an average 315% ROI over three years. Gartner predicts 80%+ of enterprises will run AI-enabled applications in production by 2026, making Copilot readiness a core evaluation criterion. 

Evaluated on active Microsoft Solutions Partner designations, industry depth, full-stack coverage, AI readiness, and post-go-live support.  

How We Evaluated These Firms 

Each company was assessed against five criteria drawn from common enterprise procurement frameworks: 

• Microsoft Solutions Partner designation: active status across Business Applications, Data & AI (Azure), and Digital & App Innovation, verified through Microsoft’s Cloud Partner Program (MCPP) scoring framework 
• Industry implementation depth: verifiable references in the client’s specific sector, not generic ERP experience 
• Full-stack Microsoft capability: coverage across ERP, CRM, Power Platform, SharePoint, and Azure AI services 
• AI and Copilot operational readiness: completed Copilot Studio deployments and live AI workflow configurations, not just awareness of available features 
• Post-go-live support structure: managed services model, SLA commitments, and team continuity from implementation through hypercare 

Top 10 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consulting Companies 

1. Beyond Key 

Best For: Mid-Market and Enterprise Digital Transformation 

Industry Expertise: Manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, nonprofit, and professional services across the UK, US, and Australia. 

Microsoft Solutions Partner (Business Applications) | 350+ certified professionals | Founded 2005 | Chicago, UK & Asia offices | Great Place to Work certified 

Beyond Key covers Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Business Central, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Power Platform, SharePoint, and Azure AI under one team, with active certifications across MB-310 (Finance), MB-330 (Supply Chain), MB-700 (Solution Architect Expert), MB-280 (Customer Experience), and MB-240 (Field Service). 

The consultants at Beyond Key have handled the scenarios that cause most mid-market projects to run over budget: consolidating data from three disconnected legacy systems, rebuilding approval workflows that had existed only in spreadsheets, and restructuring chart-of-accounts mid-project without losing timeline. 

2. Avanade

Best For: Large global businesses. 

Avanade brings together the technology expertise of Microsoft and the scale of consulting from Accenture. Because of its size, it is ideally suited for transformational programs and global rollouts for Dynamics 365. The approach and cost structure work better for an enterprise than mid-market companies. 

3. Hitachi Solutions

Best For: Manufacturing and Distribution 

Hitachi Solutions has extensive manufacturing and supply chain project experience. Its industry accelerators cut down on implementation time in particular application areas like the automotive or industrial sectors. The companies in other industries might be looking for partners who have a wider spectrum of industry expertise. 

4. HSO

Best For: Industry-Specific Implementations 

HSO specializes in the financial services, retail, and professional services sectors. It has pre-configured templates that can help to streamline deployments and minimize customization efforts. The value is best when the business is based in those sectors.

5. Velosio

Best For: Business Central and Finance Operations 

Velosio has a reputation for Business Central and Finance & Operations implementations. This team has a strong background in finance, inventory and supply chain processes. If you’re searching for a level playing field with CRM and field service, consider the capabilities of the organization. 

6. Sunrise Technologies

Best For: Retail and Apparel. 

Sunrise Technologies focuses on retail, fashion, and consumer packaged goods, sectors where Dynamics 365 Commerce and supply chain modules are central to operations. They have built vertical IP and repeatable methodology around these industries, which reduces implementation risk for organizations that match their profile. 

7. Dynamics Square

Best For: Small and medium sized businesses. 

Dynamics Square is targeting small and medium-sized businesses looking to implement Business Central or Dynamics 365 Sales. The company places emphasis on fast deployments and usability. If the project is more significant and each is highly customized, it may need extra expertise. 

8. sa.global

Best For: Companies in the field of professional services. 

sa.global is a consulting, legal and other project-oriented company. It excels in project management, resource planning, and PSA. Specialization is most suitable for professional services companies. 

9. RSM US LLP

Best For: Finance and Accounting Transformation 

RSM is an accounting advisory firm that also provides Dynamics 365 consulting. That combination is good for organizations where compliance and financial procedures are the drivers of the project. That level of accounting expertise might not be necessary for operation-oriented implementations. 

10. Alithya

Best For: Healthcare and complex enterprise projects. 

Alithya has been working in the healthcare and government sectors with experience delivering Projects in Dynamics 365. Its method is appropriate for businesses which are confronted with compliance and intricate combinations. For simpler projects, the level of structure may be more than necessary. 

Quick Comparison 

What to Look for in a Dynamics 365 Partner in 2026 

Data migration discipline: A credible partner audits source data quality, maps fields to Dynamics 365 structures, and runs parallel validation before cutover. Poor data migrated from legacy systems produces reporting errors within the first 90 days. 

AI and Copilot Capabilities: Leading Dynamics 365 partners should offer practical AI and Microsoft Copilot capabilities across Sales, Customer Service, Finance, and Supply Chain. Copilot can assist with opportunity summaries, suggested customer responses, anomaly detection, and demand forecasting, while Copilot Studio enables custom AI agents connected to Dynamics 365 data and business processes.  

Integration architecture: Mature partners integrate using Azure Integration Services, Dataverse connectors, and Power Automate, not fragile point-to-point connections that break on platform updates. 

Post-go-live continuity: Confirm whether the implementation team or a separate managed services team handles post-launch support. Clarify SLA commitments and change request pricing before contract signing. 

Why Beyond Key Stands Out Among Dynamics 365 Consulting Companies 

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, Beyond Key has been helping clients accelerate their CRM initiatives to build deeper customer relationships through the power of automation and reporting using Dynamics 365 consulting CRM. Underpinned by Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Power Platform, and the Azure Data Platform, our MS Dynamic 365 Consultants will work in partnership with you. 

Our Dynamics 365 consulting services are catered to conduct Business Value Assessments to create a compelling business case. Regardless of the nature of your business: Our Dynamics 365 Consultants will be your implementation partner in your Dynamics 365 CRM and Business Central adoption and help you with migrating from legacy CRM or modernize your existing CRM or building custom Dynamics 365 CRM solutions from scratch. 

Conclusion 

The right Microsoft Dynamics 365 consulting partner is not the one with the longest certification list or the lowest project quote. It is the one that has solved problems similar to yours, can demonstrate a structured methodology for managing implementation risk, holds verifiable Microsoft Solutions Partner credentials that require annual renewal, and will still be available to support you when the system needs to evolve six months after go-live. 

Beyond Key’s Microsoft Solutions Partner designation, 350+ certified professionals, 20+ years of implementation history, and operational Copilot practice make them a strong choice for organizations seeking full Microsoft ecosystem coverage under one accountable partner. 

Ready to Evaluate Your Dynamics 365 Options? 

If you are assessing Microsoft Dynamics 365 consulting companies for an upcoming ERP or CRM project, Beyond Key’s team can walk you through what a structured evaluation and scoping engagement looks like, before any commitment. 

Talk to a Dynamics 365 consultant at Beyond Key → 

Frequently Asked Questions 

1. How much does Dynamics 365 implementation cost?  

Business Central typically starts at $30,000–$60,000. Finance & Operations with customization and integrations generally runs $150,000–$500,000+. Always request itemized estimates separating licensing, implementation, migration, and support. 

2. How long does implementation take?  

Business Central: 3–4 months. Complex multi-module ERP with legacy migration and integrations: 9–18 months. Data quality and integration complexity are most often underestimated in initial proposals. 

3. What certifications should a partner’s consultant hold?  

ERP: MB-310 (Finance), MB-330 (Supply Chain), MB-700 (Solution Architect Expert). CRM: MB-280 (Customer Experience), MB-240 (Field Service). Ask for a named list of certified consultants, not just a headcount. 

4. Does Dynamics 365 support Microsoft Copilot?  

Yes, across Sales, Customer Service, Finance, Supply Chain, and Field Service. Copilot Studio enables custom AI agents without code. Verify current licensing requirements with any partner before scoping AI into your budget. 

The post Top 10 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consulting Companies in 2026 appeared first on Beyond Key.