Just Copying D365F&O Production Data Isn’t Safe

Refreshing a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations environment seems routine: copy production down to a sandbox, UAT, or development instance, and let the teams work. But under the surface, these refreshes are some of the most risk-laden operations in the D365 lifecycle. They involve live data, multiple systems, and a long sequence of manual steps that invite both human error and compliance exposure.
Every copy includes names, email addresses, bank details, and transactional history. Unless that data is intentionally obfuscated, the cloned environment now contains full sets of personally identifiable information that will be accessible to people without an explicit need-to-know, including offshore developers, vendors, and/or contractors. Many organizations underestimate this exposure until an auditor, or a breach, forces the issue.
The risks go beyond privacy. Environments often retain production configurations. That includes SMTP profiles, workflow endpoints, payment connectors, and custom integrations, that can cause “test” invoices or messages to accidentally reach customers. Even when teams try to sanitize these manually, the process is slow, inconsistent, and rarely documented. One person’s careful checklist becomes another person’s forgotten step.
Over time, most IT groups develop their own scripts or partial automations to cope. At Ryse Technologies, we’ve seen dozens of D365 customers attempt this: SQL scripts to wipe tables, PowerShell to reroute endpoints, and DevOps pipelines to disable workflows. They might work at first. But these one-off solutions are hard to maintain, dependent on tribal knowledge, and prone to breaking with every platform update.
That pattern is what led our team to build Clone Commander (https://ryse365.com). We didn’t set out to commercialize it; we built it because every client we helped was wrestling with the same fragile process. Clone Commander simply formalized what many teams were already trying to do: automate environment refreshes safely, apply consistent data-masking rules, and document exactly what changed. It seems to me that refresh automation is an essential infrastructure for any organization operating multiple D365 environments.
When you step back, the case for automation is less about convenience and more about risk reduction and sustainability. Manual refreshes drain time from senior IT staff, create uneven configurations across environments, and carry real substantial risk if PII or integrations slip through.
In the same way infrastructure-as-code transformed deployment, refresh-as-policy is becoming the new standard for ERP administration. The organizations that adopt it early will spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. The ones that don’t will keep copying production and hoping nothing goes wrong.