We’re evaluating whether to move our Dynamics 365 reporting infrastructure from on-premise SQL Server Reporting Services to cloud-hosted Power BI with Azure Synapse. I’d love to hear experiences from others who’ve made this transition.
Our main considerations are data residency requirements (we operate in EU and APAC with strict data sovereignty rules), compliance certifications for financial reporting, query performance SLAs for executive dashboards, and total cost of ownership. Our current on-premise setup handles about 500 daily report users with peak loads during month-end close. We’re spending roughly $180K annually on infrastructure, licensing, and maintenance.
What have been the real-world benefits and challenges with cloud analytics? Particularly interested in hearing about performance compared to dedicated on-premise hardware and any compliance hurdles you’ve encountered.
From a compliance perspective, cloud actually gave us better audit trails than our on-premise setup. Power BI Premium has SOC 2, ISO 27001, and industry-specific certifications like HIPAA. The key is ensuring your data residency settings match your regulatory requirements. We had to get legal sign-off on Microsoft’s data processing agreements for each region. One challenge: some compliance frameworks require on-premise data for specific report types, so we ended up with a hybrid model.
Query performance in cloud has been excellent for us but requires different optimization strategies. We use Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pools for large datasets and Power BI import mode for frequently accessed reports. The key is understanding the cost implications - dedicated pools aren’t cheap. We actually saw 30% faster dashboard load times compared to our old on-premise setup because of Power BI’s caching and the distributed query engine in Synapse.
We moved to Power BI Premium last year and saw immediate benefits in deployment speed and collaboration. However, data residency was tricky - we had to set up separate workspaces in EU and APAC regions to comply with GDPR and local regulations. The multi-geo capabilities in Premium handle this well once configured.