A queryable, compliance-grade Dynamics 365 archive on AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI. F&O, Business Central, and Dataverse / CE — all in Parquet at pennies per GB-month. SQL/REST/Parquet access, role-based security with sensitive-field masking, indefinite retention horizon.
BYOD pipelines, Synapse Link exports, Lifecycle Services backups, Azure SQL snapshots — none of them serve actual consumers. Cloud archive does.
Traditional Dynamics 365 archival meant either keeping a 'lights-on' D365 tenant alive at $300K–$1.5M per year, taking Lifecycle Services environment backups to cold Azure storage that no one could query without a multi-day environment restore, or running BYOD into an Azure SQL DB that incurs its own ongoing licensing and management overhead. All three patterns satisfy the regulatory 'retain the data' requirement on paper while failing the 'access the data' requirement in practice — and none of them carry the customization catalog, security snapshot, or signed audit-evidence trail that audit and regulators actually need.
The Dynamics 365 cloud archive solves all of it. Data lives in commodity cloud object storage as compressed columnar Parquet — typically 8–15x smaller than the source Azure SQL DB and Dataverse environment, costing a few thousand dollars per year for multi-TB datasets. Query interfaces (SQL, REST, direct Parquet) serve auditors, regulators, finance analysts, sales operations, and former employees without any environment-restore step. Pre-materialized datasets serve the highest-frequency queries in sub-second. The customization catalog (X++ extensions, AOT, Power Platform inventory) sits alongside the data, queryable by the same tools.
Cloud archive is also forward-compatible. The archive lives in your cloud account, in your storage, accessible to whichever BI and audit tools your organization standardizes on. As your tooling evolves over the 7–15 year retention window — as Power BI gives way to Fabric, as Tableau evolves, as new audit tools emerge — the archive stays accessible because the SQL endpoint is universal. No Microsoft-licensed runtime required.
Three deployment patterns covering every Azure-residency, governance, and data-sovereignty requirement we've seen.
Fastest deployment (1–2 weeks), lowest operational burden. Data hosted in Syntra cloud accounts in customer's preferred region. SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001.
Most common D365 pattern. Data and storage in customer's own Azure subscription (matching your existing D365 residency), AWS account, GCP project, or OCI tenancy, with customer-managed keys. Syntra deploys and operates the query layer via remote control plane.
Full self-hosted. Customer's infrastructure, customer's operations team. Syntra provides software, deployment automation, and L3 support. For customers with strict no-vendor-access policies.
AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, Azure China, OCI Government. FedRAMP-compatible deployment for Public Sector and defense customers with sovereignty requirements.
Archive data in one cloud (e.g. Azure Blob to match existing D365 residency), query via another (e.g. Snowflake on AWS for analytics-team alignment). For customers with cross-cloud governance.
Fully disconnected deployment for defense, intelligence, and pharmaceutical customers. Air-gapped install, periodic delta updates via approved transfer mechanism.
From scoping to first auditor query. Most Dynamics 365 cloud archive deployments complete in 6–10 weeks.
Cloud account selection (often matching existing Azure subscription for residency), object storage buckets provisioned, encryption keys generated (KMS or CMK via Azure Key Vault), network paths configured (VPC endpoints, Private Link, Azure Private Endpoint). IdP integration scoped — typically Microsoft Entra ID for D365 customers.
Full F&O table extract (LedgerJournalTrans, VendTable, CustTable, MainAccount, HcmWorker, etc.) via SQL Server read access or BYOD pipeline; Dataverse extract for CE entities via TDS endpoint + Web API. Parquet conversion with partition design (year/period/LE/dimension), upload to object storage. Hash signatures captured. Manifest files written for auditability.
AOT inventory captured from F&O (X++ extensions, custom Tables, modified Forms, Class extensions), Lifecycle Services package catalog snapshot taken, Dataverse solution registry exported, Power Platform connector list captured. 'D365 system encyclopedia' document drafted with derived business purpose per artifact.
SQL/REST/Parquet endpoints provisioned. Role-based security configured per consumer profile. Sensitive-field masking rules applied (SSN, bank, salary, customer PII inheriting from Dataverse column metadata). Audit-log pipeline to SIEM configured.
Trial balance per period per LE, AP aging per BU, AR aging per BU, payroll register per period, asset register snapshots, headcount rollups, sales pipeline quarter-end snapshots, win-rate by product per quarter — pre-computed for instant response on common queries.
Auditor, finance, HR, sales operations consumer testing against archive vs live D365. Documentation delivered. Consumer training. D365 tenant moves to read-only or decommissioned. Archive is now system of record for retention purposes; tiered-storage policy activates for cost optimization.
Six capabilities that turn 'D365 data preserved' into 'D365 data useful'.
Power BI, Tableau, Cognos, Looker, Fabric connect via standard JDBC/ODBC to query archive data instantly. No 'restore environment, configure entities, build BYOD job' workflow — just SQL.
External auditors run their own SELECT queries against archived LedgerJournalTrans, VendInvoiceJour, CustInvoiceJour, MainAccount, Dataverse Account / Opportunity with their familiar tooling. Sensitive fields masked, every query logged for SOX evidence.
Archived historical D365 data feeds ML models for fraud detection, revenue prediction, customer-churn modeling, supplier-risk scoring — accessible from Spark, Databricks, SageMaker, Vertex AI, Fabric directly via Parquet without re-extraction.
Join pre-migration D365 archive with post-migration Oracle Fusion live data in a single Snowflake/BigQuery/Fabric query. 10-year trends span both Microsoft and Oracle systems seamlessly.
Targeted preservation, point-in-time freezing, defensible deletion — all native to the cloud archive's immutable-versioning storage layer. Faster than running litigation holds in a live D365 tenant.
Record-level redaction with audit trail across F&O VendTable / CustTable and Dataverse Contact / Account. Erasure requests fulfilled programmatically, with cryptographic proof of permanent removal — without needing a Microsoft tenant alive to do the deletion.
A Dynamics 365 cloud archive is a queryable, compliance-grade store of D365 data — every F&O table, every Business Central ledger entry, every Dataverse entity, every customization artifact, every report definition — held in cloud object storage with a managed query interface. It replaces the legacy pattern of keeping a 'lights-on' D365 tenant alive for compliance and audit access at $300K–$1.5M per year. The cloud archive runs on commodity object storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCS, OCI Object Storage) at pennies per GB-month, exposes SQL/REST/Parquet interfaces, applies role-based security with sensitive-field masking, logs every access for audit evidence, and supports retention horizons of 7+ years (SOX/IRS), 6+ years (HIPAA), or indefinite for industry-specific regimes like FDA 21 CFR Part 11.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Database) and the newer Synapse Link for Dataverse / Azure Data Lake export are extraction pipelines — they get D365 data into your Azure tenancy in a queryable form, but they do not provide retention management, compliance-grade audit logging, sensitive-field masking, multi-cloud portability, or consumer-facing access tooling. A Syntra cloud archive is the destination layer those pipelines feed into (along with our own F&O extractor and Dataverse extractor). It adds the governance, security, retention, and access layer needed for the archive to actually serve auditors, regulators, employees, and analysts over a 7–15 year window. Many customers run BYOD as the extract path and Syntra as the archive layer; others use Syntra end-to-end.
All major hyperscalers: AWS (S3 storage, Athena query, optional Glue catalog), Azure (Blob Storage, Synapse Serverless SQL, Fabric, optional Purview catalog), GCP (Cloud Storage, BigQuery external tables), OCI (Object Storage, Autonomous Database, Analytics Cloud). Customer-managed encryption keys (CMK) supported on all platforms via AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS, OCI Vault. Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments supported — for example, archive data in Azure Blob (because your Azure-tenant residency policies require it) but expose query via Snowflake on AWS — for customers with cross-cloud governance requirements. Air-gapped and government-cloud deployments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, Azure China) also supported for Public Sector and regulated customers.
Very small relative to D365 operating cost. Typical mid-size D365 F&O environments run 600GB–2.5TB on Azure SQL DB; Dataverse / CE environments add 100GB–800GB. After Parquet compression, archives typically land at 70–280GB. At standard cloud object storage pricing ($0.02–$0.025/GB-month for warm tier), that's $20–$80/month, $240–$960/year. Even multi-TB enterprise archives rarely exceed $5K/year in storage. Query compute is the larger variable cost — typically $200–$2,500/month depending on query volume, with most customers landing in the $500–$1,200/month range. Total annual cost: $6K–$18K vs $300K–$1.5M for keeping live D365. Tiered storage (warm → cold → glacier) for very old periods drops it further.
Yes. The archive's columnar Parquet storage plus partition pruning handles billion-row tables natively. Largest D365 archives in production: 4.2B-row LedgerJournalTrans (full-history GL for a global manufacturer with 12 years of F&O history), 3.1B-row InventTrans (multi-site inventory movement for a global retailer), 1.5B-row Dataverse Activity (15 years of customer-service case interactions for a global telco). Typical query response: 2–5 seconds for single-period single-LE queries, 10–30 seconds for multi-year aggregations, with year-end audit datasets pre-materialized for instant response. The archive scales linearly with object storage — no infrastructure capacity planning required.
Not 'real-time' in the operational-database sense — the archive is a system of record for historical/compliance data, not a transactional replacement. But it does support incremental updates: customers still operating Dynamics 365 (pre-migration, or in hybrid scenarios where F&O moves to Fusion but CE stays on Dataverse) can configure delta capture via F&O ModifiedDateTime watermarks, Business Events, or Dataverse change-tracking, so the archive stays within minutes of source. For full-decommission customers, the archive is frozen at decommission date and never updated again — which simplifies the audit story significantly and triggers tiered-storage cost reductions.
Defense in depth. Storage: encryption at rest with KMS-managed keys (or customer-managed keys on request), bucket-level access control, immutable object versioning for audit-tamper-evidence. Network: TLS 1.3 for all access, private endpoints (VPC endpoints / Private Link) for in-cloud access, IP allowlist for external auditor access. Identity: role-based access tied to enterprise IdP via SAML/OIDC (including Microsoft Entra ID), MFA-required for sensitive roles, just-in-time elevation for unmask operations. Audit: every query logged with user, timestamp, query text, rows returned, fields touched — log itself stored immutably and exported to SIEM. Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA BAA, FedRAMP-compatible deployments available.
Yes. Deployment options: (1) Syntra-managed SaaS — fastest to deploy, lowest operational overhead. (2) Customer-hosted in customer cloud account — data and storage stay in customer infrastructure (your Azure subscription, your AWS account, your OCI tenancy), Syntra deploys and operates the query layer remotely via a control plane. (3) Customer-hosted, customer-operated — full self-hosted, Syntra provides software and L3 support. Most Dynamics 365 customers choose option 2 (customer cloud account, Syntra-operated) — it satisfies Microsoft Azure residency requirements, customer-managed-key requirements, and Entra ID integration while keeping operational burden low. All three options are functionally identical from a consumer perspective.
30-minute call. Walk through your D365 product mix (F&O, BC, CE), cloud preference, data-residency requirements, and retention horizon — leave with a deployment plan and a year-1 cost number.