Infrastructure is vital and ensures the reliability of the solution, assuring the availability of daily business operations. It must also be able to sustain an agreed level of uptime, with cloud SaaS offering that all infrastructure work is managed by Microsoft data centers.
Hardware sizing depends on elements, as well as a number of transactions, users, locations, and the available connectivity for each location. The infrastructure must also meet the architectural requirements of the servers that will ride the application, database, and reporting. All this information is captured during environment provisioning.
Microsoft provides a minimum of three environments, as follows:
- The first is a development environment for testing customizations and new functionalities.
- The second is a user acceptance test (UAT) environment that is a replication of the live environment and can accept tested updates from the development environment.
- The third is a live production environment for live transactions. It is similarly important to consider clustering and load balancing.