Azure

Azure is Microsoft's public cloud platform and the underlying infrastructure that hosts every Dynamics 365 app and the Power Platform. From a customer's perspective Azure shows up in several ways: as the region where the Dynamics 365 environment is provisioned, as the identity provider (Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure AD) that signs users in, and as the place where companies build complementary services — APIs, integrations, data warehouses, and AI models — that talk to Dynamics 365. Azure is also where partners host Logic Apps, Service Bus queues, and Functions used to integrate Business Central or Finance with third-party systems.

In practice, most Dynamics 365 customers never provision an Azure resource directly to run the core apps themselves — Microsoft operates that infrastructure invisibly, and a customer's own Azure footprint only appears when a specific integration or extension needs one: an Azure Function behind a plugin, a Service Bus queue for event-driven integration, or a Logic App calling out to a third-party system. Needing Dynamics 365 and needing an Azure subscription of one's own are two genuinely separate facts, easy to conflate because both ultimately run on the same underlying cloud.

Where confusion shows up: Microsoft Entra ID (the identity layer that signs users into Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and any Azure resources a company owns) was previously called Azure AD, and older documentation, job postings, and partner materials still use the old name — it's the same service under a newer name, not a different product. The region a Dynamics 365 environment is provisioned in is also an Azure concept under the hood, which is why data-residency questions for a Dynamics 365 tenant are answered by looking at Azure region availability, not a separate Dynamics-specific map.