Business Central - Creating a Sandbox in BC SaaS

Microsoft 365 Business Central has different flavors, by different flavors, I mean there is two kinds, maybe three. They are on-premises, SaaS, and Hybrid. Each has its own advantages based upon the needs of your organization.

I do believe that SaaS should meet over 90% of most organizations. But this is another topic and requires long discussion and discovery to identify which direction you should go.

But let’s say that you have already chosen the SaaS model and you are an admin that is ready to take it on and manage it. Specifically, we will discuss how easy it is to create a test or sandbox environment through the Admin Center. If it’s your first time managing Business Central SaaS, check out my blog about the basic understanding of admin center.

So let’s focus in how to create a sandbox. Keep in mind that creating a sandbox takes up your allocated storage and as of this writing, the default storage size is 80GB. You are also allocated of up to 3 sandboxes and 1 production. So let’s get started in how you can create a sandbox in under 3 minutes.

Navigate to your admin center, by clicked the settings or gear menu from the main screen of your Business Central role.

Then highlight the Environments and you should see a list of your environments so ensure that you are meeting the minimum requirements I noted above, then click New. A side menu should pop up that will require to be populated. Give it a meaningful environment name, you should choose “Sandbox” as the Type and the Country where the tenant will reside. As for the version, most likely it will only provide you one version, usually the latest version.

This process allows you to create a brand new sandbox. If you want to create a copy of your production as a sandbox, follow the other step below.

If you wanted to create a sandbox with a copy of data from your sandbox, the process is slight different but only from where you begin. From the Environments menu, click into your Production environment. At the top menu bar, you should see an option for Copy. Once clicked, you will see a side menu show up. Give it a meaning name for the new environment and the type should be Sandbox and click Copy. That’s it! So easy and simple. The environment will be available very quickly, depending upon the size of the production environment.