About Client
New Zealand’s most awarded mortgage & insurance advisor Global Finance caters to about 1,500+ customers for their mortgage or insurance needs every year so that they can meet their financial goals. Global Finance offers more preference & freedom, with loan approvals from numerous lenders if chosen by the customers. Dealing with a large number of clients & team members, Global Finance was facing issues managing their unstructured data. As Peritos had already been managing their Dynamics environment, we successfully guided and supported Global Finance’s move from saving data from Azure Dataverse to Azure Blob Storage which saved them 1500$ a month.
- https://www.globalfinance.co.nz/
- Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Project Background
Global Finance has been offering smarter loans and insurance since 1999. Working as one of the best mortgage & insurance advisers in NZ, Global Finance helped clients to save on their loans by avoiding unnecessary interest and getting mortgage-free faster. Since the beginning, they have helped some customers become mortgage-free in as little as 7 years rather than the standard 30-year term. Global Finance was already using Dynamics 365 and saving data from Azure Dataverse; moving to Azure Blob Storage has optimized storage for massive amounts of unstructured data.
Scope & Requirement
In the 1st Phase of the Windows Virtual Server Setup, implementation was discussed as follows:
Setting up saving data from Azure Dataverse to Azure Blob Storage to handle large unstructured datasets for Global Finance. Azure Blob Storage helps fulfill enterprise-level requirements for scalable data storage and analysis.
Implement the customer support service model to enable automated requirement gathering forms, email collation on customer records, and automated task creation for customer updates.
Implementation
Technology and Architecture
Technology
The migration was deployed with the below technological component
- For Azure Dataverse-The underlying technology used was Azure SQL Database
- For Azure Blob Storage- It supported the most popular development frameworks including Java, .NET, Python & Node.js
- Customer Support service implementation
Security & Compliance:
- Checking data retention requirement
- Checking file sync from On premise to Cloud
- Checking customer is being sent automated email and PDFs from system
- Emails being recorded and added to Dynamics 365 for all interactions
Backup and Recovery
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers built-in backup and restore capabilities through its native data management features, ensuring business continuity. Automated daily backups and point-in-time restore options provide added security and peace of mind for your critical CRM data.
Network Architecture
The network architecture for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is designed with security in mind, enabling users to remotely access the system only through secure channels such as VPN or conditional access policies, ensuring data protection and compliance. Also there was no connectivity from home as well to avoid any breach of client confidential data.
Cost Optimization
Alerts and notifications are configured in the Azure Cost dashboard configured for client as well as cloudchkr tool. Peritos would send monthly license based invoice adding details and itemized information regarding the cost.
Code Management, Deployment
Cloudformation scripts for deploying data was used for managing the JavaScript and plugin based code.
Challenges of Migrating from Azure Dataverse to Azure Blob Storage
- Data Structure Mismatch: Dataverse stores data in a relational format with rich metadata, relationships, and business logic, while Blob Storage is unstructured, requiring transformation and flattening of data.
- Loss of Metadata & Relationships: Referential integrity, lookups, and entity relationships in Dataverse are not retained in Blob Storage unless explicitly rebuilt or documented.
- Security Model Differences: Dataverse has a detailed role-based access control (RBAC) model; Blob Storage requires separate access controls like SAS tokens, RBAC, or shared access policies, which may require redesigning security.
Support for Dynamics Discounted Licensing
- For all Licenses we implement we provide monthly billing with 20 days credit terms.
- We provide value added services by sending reports to the client on the license usage and last activity date for each user to help them manage their license cost and to get visibility.
Next Phase
- We are also in discussion with other projects for the client
- Dynamics CRM system support
- O365 License Management
