Retail cloud scale unit – multi-region

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Note

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. To see when this functionality is planned to release, please review What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 for Retail. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

Retail organizations with channel operations across wide, geographically distributed locations find themselves unable to provide low latency, highly responsive user experiences for their employees in locations farther away from the primary cloud region for their environment.

To mitigate high network latency in such cases, IT administrators today typically deploy the environment in a hybrid topology, with some components installed on-premises (in a physical retail store) or in a regional private data center. This, however, imposes additional capex and operational burdens on these organizations.

Multi-region support for retail alleviates this pain and enables administrators to leverage Microsoft’s global network of cloud data centers to serve each of their stores from cloud regions within much closer proximity, and thereby provide improved latency and user-perceived responsiveness.

Business value

This feature allows for reduced latency for point of sale (POS) operations in a retail organization operating across geographically distributed locations. By serving requests from cloud regions closest to the retail channel, latency and performance at point of sale can be considerably better than otherwise, and prevent long checkout lines and purchase abandonment during peak hours and seasons.

Feature description

Retail IT administrators can serve channels from multiple different cloud regions and provide improved network latency and overall faster response times for their point of sale operations in the store. This allows retail organizations to operate in a cloud-first model and alleviates the need for local deployment of in-store components (such as RSSU and POS offline) to experience low improved latency.

IT administrators can configure one or more channels to be served from a specific cloud region. IT administrators still retain control on data residency and can control which regions their data can be served from.