Existing SAS Customer Intelligence 6 environments run on SAS 9.4M7 or earlier, and SAS 9.4M7 moves to Limited Support in September 2025. CI 6 components are not released on SAS 9.4M8.   The Direct Agent which SAS CI 360 uses to communicate between the cloud and the on-premises SAS 9.4 environment is supported on M7 and M8.   Recommendation  For customers moving to CI360, SAS recommends deploying a separate SAS 9 environment for 360 Direct using the latest supported maintenance release (currently M8). SAS 9.4M8 has many critical security fixes as well as benefiting from SAS’s standard 5-year standard support policy through to January 2028.     As the new Direct Marketing Agent is lightweight and the data processing is very similar to legacy Marketing Automation, infrastructure of similar size is suitable, assuming the current performance of Marketing Automation is adequate and there is sufficient capacity for the expected growth in campaigns. If not, request an estimate from the hardware sizing team. The customer database can typically be reused.   If storage is provided externally and with campaigns managed in the CI 360 cloud, the 360 Direct SAS 9 environment can be treated as a static runtime as there is no frequently changing persistent data stored in metadata.   Recovery and availability requirements can be met using a simple VM with recovery from machine images and a SAS backup. For typical deployments, scalability can be achieved by using a larger single machine if required (capacity is required for campaign execution only, as processing related to user sessions, UI and designing campaigns is now in the cloud).   Once the migration is complete, the MA server components can be decommissioned.   SAS strongly advises against adding the Direct Marketing agent to the existing MA environment as releases prior to M8 are either already in limited support or soon will be.  ... View more