The cloud promised you'd never need to think about upgrades again. That's not quite the whole story.
When organisations move to a cloud ERP system, one of the most appealing promises is that upgrades become someone else's problem. Microsoft will keep your system current, new functionality arrives automatically, and you never face another one of those costly, disruptive multi-year upgrade projects. That promise is largely true — and it's genuinely one of the best things about cloud. But it comes with a part of the story that often goes untold.
Microsoft releases two major updates to Business Central each year, with smaller updates in between. For the core application, Microsoft handles the rollout. What they don't handle are the parts of your solution that are unique to your business — your customisations, your custom extensions, and integrations with other systems. Those sit outside the core application. They don't update themselves, and they don't get tested by anyone unless you make it happen.
This is where many organisations discover that "upgrades are a thing of the past" was a simplification rather than a guarantee.
There's something worth preserving from the old world of on-premises upgrades. When a major version change came around — sometimes every three to five years, sometimes longer — it was treated as a project. There was planning, coordination, structured testing, and a deliberate focus on what had changed and what might break. That discipline existed because the stakes demanded it.
With cloud releases, the stakes haven't changed — the frequency has. Each major release deserves the same kind of attention, applied in a proportionate, efficient way. It doesn't need to be a large project. But it does need to be managed.
A release left unmanaged in a production environment isn't a neutral event. If something breaks quietly — a customisation behaving unexpectedly, an integration failing to pass data correctly — the cost of finding and fixing it after the fact is almost always greater than the cost of catching it beforehand.
At Professional Advantage, we built our Release Management Program after seeing this pattern repeat across our client base. The traditional support and account management relationship is valuable, but it wasn't designed to handle the proactive, release-by-release coordination that cloud environments now require. We added a third element: dedicated release management, focused specifically on each client's unique solution.
Four years on, the program covers over 105 organisations across approximately 160 production Business Central environments. That scale matters, not as a number, but because of what it represents: visibility. When you're coordinating releases across that many environments, you see patterns early. You learn which types of customisations tend to cause friction, which third-party extensions warrant closer attention, and how to focus testing effort where it will count most for a given client's solution.
105+ organisations ~160 production environments 4 years running 2×major releases per year
The practical result, for each client, is that every major release is approached with a consistent methodology: coordination across the relevant parties, assessment of what's changed and what that means for your specific environment, structured testing with a focus on your customisations and integrations, and a clear path to understanding what new functionality might be worth adopting.
The goal isn't to create overhead. It's to make sure that the update Microsoft applies to your system lands well — and that you're in control of what happens next.
The cloud has kept its promise. You are always on the latest version, and you don't need the large, expensive upgrade projects of the past. But "latest version" and "well-managed solution" aren't the same thing. The organisations that get the most from Business Central are the ones treating each release as a small, structured event — not something that just happens.
If you're not sure whether your current approach covers the unique parts of your solution, it's worth a conversation.
If Release Management is something you do not currently have and you would like to discuss this with Professional Advantage, please contact us. Our program is called the Client Care Program and covers the important elements in the successful, ongoing lifecycle of 100% of your Business Central solution.
