Do I need Azure for Dynamics 365?
By Emil Björk · Microsoft business apps consultant, Gothenburg
Not for the core products themselves — Business Central, the Dataverse-based CE apps, and Finance and Operations all run on Microsoft-managed infrastructure without you provisioning any Azure resources directly. You need Azure as a separate, explicit purchase only when a specific integration or extension requires it — an Azure Function behind a plugin, Azure Service Bus for a high-volume integration, or Azure Data Factory to move data at scale.
This confuses people because Dynamics 365 genuinely does run on Azure under the hood — Microsoft's own cloud, invisible to you as a customer. That's different from you having, or needing, an Azure subscription of your own to operate the core Dynamics 365 apps day to day.
The trigger for needing your own Azure subscription is almost always a specific integration or extensibility pattern that goes beyond what the Dynamics 365 platform itself exposes — a custom API hosted in Azure Functions, an event-driven integration through Service Bus, or a data pipeline through Data Factory or Synapse. None of those are required to use Dynamics 365; they're additive, chosen per integration need.
Go deeper
- Azure vs Power Platform: when to use whichBoth let you build applications on Microsoft's cloud. Power Platform is low-code and opinionated for business apps; Azure is pro-code and general-purpose.
- Azure Functions for Dynamics 365 integrationsHow to use Azure Functions to extend and integrate Dynamics 365 — patterns, authentication, lifecycle, performance, and the trade-offs vs Power Automate.
- Azure Service Bus integration with DataverseHow Dataverse publishes change events to Azure Service Bus — registration, message format, queues vs topics, and resilient consumer patterns.