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Microsoft Azure offers cloud benefits with familiar functionality.
In a world of constant innovation and technological advances — and also increasingly sophisticated security threats — modernization is key for any business looking to stay competitive. Having real-time access to data means organizations can quickly uncover new opportunities. Keeping your platform secure and resilient so business can operate without disruption is critical.
Though there are many benefits to moving to the cloud, migrating legacy applications can be challenging. Organizations worry about reskilling their teams, application downtime, and the total cost and time required to modernize their on-premises environments.
That's why "lifting and shifting" existing on-premises SQL Server environments to SQL Server on Azure Virtual machines is a simple, quick, and cost-effective path for companies that are concerned about complex cloud migration for legacy workloads, but need to gain cloud benefits today.
Simple path of migration to accelerated performance
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is 100% compatible with on-premises SQL Server. That means migration can be as simple as transferring a current SQL Server database instance to the Azure Virtual Machine. Once migrated, teams can leverage their existing SQL Server skills seamlessly — using the same powerful SQL Server they are familiar with, now in the cloud.
When onboarding new virtual machines, customers can select the powerful combination of SQL Server and Intel®. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines — accelerated by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors — meets mission-critical requirements up to 57% faster while costing 54% less than AWS, based on the results of a recent GigaOm Transactional Field test.
Microsoft also has offers to help organizations save on costs. For example, businesses can leverage their existing SQL Server or Windows Server licenses and save up to 85% over the standard pay-as-you-go rate.
SQL familiarity with cloud innovation
Azure Virtual Machine customers benefit from a comprehensive cloud computing platform with security from the ground up. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines customers gain access to Azure's leading cloud security platform, which includes advanced threat protection, database encryption, and robust authentication features.
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines also delivers further convenience with high availability and workload scalability for modern workloads needing fast access and flexibility in their data management solution.
With the SQL Server IaaS Agent Extension, users can gain access to a free set of management and administration tools that can further improve the security, availability, and efficiency of SQL Server running on Azure Virtual Machines while reducing license costs.
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines in practice
When leading London-based firm Atrium Underwriters wanted to modernize its over 800 databases, it turned to Microsoft for help.
The specialist insurance business has a small IT team that has relied on Microsoft's SQL Server for years, and wanted to help its underwriters create a competitive advantage by developing more accurate risk assessments using near-real-time analytics. The catch is that Atrium wanted to do this without building and managing complex packages and pipelines. Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 allowed the business to quickly collect data from various systems to its reporting layer, where it can be transformed and curated for use by Atrium Underwriters. This simplified access to near-real-time data has accelerated claims processing, improving the customer experience.
The use of Azure Virtual Machines made the success of Atrium's Azure ecosystem possible. "Given the amount of technical debt we had, it made sense for us to lift and shift VMs over to Azure," Nic Hopper, data architect for Atrium, said. "Anything else would have required us to rewrite code and expend significant effort for very little gain.
"Although we'll revisit them as we develop new systems, virtual machines are everything to us at this point," he added. "We don't have to worry about infrastructure or disaster recovery — we're covered on many angles."
For companies like Atrium, looking to accelerate innovation by quickly moving legacy applications to the cloud, the option to lift and shift their existing SQL Server to an Azure Virtual Machine can be transformative. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines provides organizations with comprehensive benefits, an easy migration experience, and cost savings opportunities — all while leveraging the same SQL Server they already know.
Find out more about how SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines can help your business.
This post was created by Insider Studios with Microsoft and Intel.