Better on Azure

The benefits of using Azure

for Windows Server and
SQL Server workloads
Why Azure for Windows Server and SQL
Server workloads in the cloud?
For more than 25 years, businesses have chosen Windows Server and
SQL Server to run their critical workloads. Increasingly, they are
moving those workloads to the cloud to support innovation and
digital transformation. With end of support for SQL Server 2008 on
9th July, 2019, and for Windows Server 2008 on 14th January, 2020,
migration decisions take on even greater urgency.
Enterprise customers are choosing Azure for their Windows Server
and SQL Server workloads. In fact, in a 2019 Microsoft survey of 500
enterprise customers, when those customers were asked about their
migration plans for Windows Server, they were 30% more likely to
choose Azure.
There are four key reasons that make Azure the logical choice for
Windows Server and SQL Server workloads:
• Defence-in-depth security that is easy to implement and manage,
including broad compliance capabilities.
• Support for rapid innovation with fully managed services across
apps, data and infrastructure.
• Unmatched hybrid solutions designed from the ground up to
bridge on-premises and cloud seamlessly.
• Compelling cost advantages for many customers, with several
benefits available only on Azure.

In this white paper, we’ll examine each of these themes in greater

depth to highlight why Azure makes sense for applications that rely
on SQL Server or Windows Server.

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 Highly secure and compliant
Enterprises already choose Windows Server and SQL Server for their
Microsoft employs proven security and compliance capabilities. Today, they’re discovering
that Azure simplifies the implementation of a comprehensive, modern
>3,500 security posture.

cybersecurity Azure delivers multiple layers of security, including the secure

foundation of our physical datacentres, operational best practices and
professionals and
engineering processes that follow industry-standard guidelines.
invests 1 billion
Microsoft employs more than 3,500 cybersecurity professionals and
USD annually1 to
invests 1 billion USD annually1 to protect against, detect and respond
protect against, to threats. Our security operations work 24×7×365 for our customers.
detect and
respond to threats.

1https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-cyber-microsoft-idUSKBN15A1GA
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 One place for security best practices
Azure Security Centre is a unified infrastructure security management
Microsoft system that strengthens your security posture providing advanced
threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud and on
Intelligent Security
premises. It offers security recommendations for virtual machines,
Graph, collects storage, networking, databases, identity, application services and IoT,
>6.5 trillion all from a single integrated dashboard.
Azure Security Centre leverages the Microsoft Intelligent Security
signals daily from
Graph, which collects more than 6.5 trillion signals daily from
Microsoft services Microsoft services such as Xbox, Dynamics 365, Office 365, Azure and
our broad partner ecosystem.
By installing an agent on Windows Server, you can get detailed
Early adopters of recommendations on which best practices to implement such as
installing end-point protection and the latest patches. Azure Security
Azure Sentinel
Centre also comes with all the capabilities of Microsoft Defender
have reported up Azure Threat Protection built in to protect your Windows Server and
to SQL Server workloads.

90% Customers also have access to Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native Security

Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. It requires no
reduction in alert on-premises infrastructure, reducing the complexity of running
fatigue enterprise SIEM.
With built-in AI, Azure Sentinel enables you to focus on the
important threats rather than low-fidelity signals. It also cuts alert
noise with intelligent correlation. Early adopters of Azure Sentinel
have reported up to 90% reduction in alert fatigue. By bringing
together signals from your Windows Server and SQL Server
workloads with Office 365, third-party cloud and on-premises
applications, and firewalls, Azure Sentinel empowers your team to
identify and mitigate increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

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Simplified enterprise governance
Azure provides a consistent policy platform that enables you to
efficiently define and apply security policies across your subscriptions
or management groups at scale with Azure Policy. Creating
preconfigured subscriptions that conform to your organisation’s
policies and requirements can be accomplished quickly using Azure
Blueprints. With Azure Management Groups, you can apply policies
with flexible hierarchies to multiple subscriptions. And, you can
maintain visibility into your resources using Azure Resource Graph
inventory management. All these capabilities are included as part of
Azure Governance capabilities.

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 Broad compliance capabilities
The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving and expanding, and

>90 the complexity of achieving and maintaining compliance increases in

the process. This means cloud providers and cloud customers must
compliance adhere to broad security standards, such as data classification, access
management, encryption, logging and reporting, security incident
offerings specific response and so forth.
to various
Microsoft Azure provides over 90 compliance offerings specific to
countries/regions various countries/regions and industries. The Azure platform meets
and industries some of the most rigorous security and compliance standards in the
world. Azure also provides governance, risk and compliance tools to
help you develop your own compliant cloud apps and document
your adherence to compliance standards. With these and other
solutions, Microsoft does much of the work of compliance for you so
you can focus more of your efforts on your core business processes.
For instances in which even your cloud provider must be prohibited
from accessing data or compute resources in your cloud
environment, there’s Azure confidential computing. It offers
encryption of data while in use, a protection that has historically been
missing from public clouds.

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 Designed for innovation
Speeding novel solutions to market is a key reason for migrating to
“…we spend less the cloud. Achieving this goal requires freeing IT and development
talent from mundane management tasks. You also need flexible,
time on
scalable and highly available cloud infrastructure as a foundation.
maintenance, …. Windows Server and SQL workloads on Azure meet these needs,
[and] run a version supporting increased agility and rapid innovation.
of SQL that is “We moved our SQL Server 2008 to Azure SQL Database managed
always current instance, and it has been a great move for us. Not only do we spend
less time on maintenance, but we now run a version of SQL that is
with no need for
always current with no need for upgrade and patching.”
upgrade and
– Charlotte Lindahl,
patching.”
Project Manager, KMD
– Charlotte Lindahl,
Project Manager,
KMD

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 Quickly move apps to the cloud
Migrating your ASP.NET applications from on-premises to Azure can
Use Cognitive be accomplished in as little as a few minutes with Azure App Service.
It enables you to build and host web apps, mobile back ends and
Services to add
RESTful APIs in the programming language of your choice without
search managing infrastructure. It offers auto-scaling and high availability,
functionality, supports both Windows and Linux and enables automated
vision or speech to deployments from GitHub, Azure DevOps or any Git repo.

your App Service Once on Azure App Service, you can integrate managed functionality
from Azure to deliver advanced capabilities much faster than building
web app
them from scratch. For example, you can add search functionality,
vision or speech to your App Service web app using Cognitive
Services. You can globally scale databases connected to your App
Using NoSQL at Service web app using Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for
global scale is easy MySQL. Using NoSQL at global scale is easy with Azure Cosmos DB.
Quickly extend the functionality of your web applications and APIs
with Azure with serverless technologies including Azure Functions, Logic Apps
Cosmos DB and API Management capabilities.
Microsoft offers extensive tools and support for the end-to-end
application development cycle, enabling you to adopt an agile
DevOps approach for efficient innovation. With these capabilities, you
can plan smarter, collaborate better and ship faster. For example,
Azure Monitor provides intelligent and proactive analytics so you can
analyse and continuously improve the performance of your
applications. Using GitHub and Azure DevOps empowers you to
create highly efficient deployment pipelines that enable rapid release
cycles.

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 Intelligent databases that are always up to
date
Trained on millions When you migrate SQL Server databases to the Azure cloud, you can
of databases, the adopt Azure SQL Database managed instance for evergreen SQL that
never needs to be patched or upgraded along. At the same time, you
intelligent security gain end-to-end SQL Server Engine compatibility for migration
and performance without code changes. For customers who need ultimate control over
features in Azure low-level SQL Server features, Azure provides robust Infrastructure as
a Service (IaaS) to ensure you can still gain the benefits of the cloud
SQL Database
while using your chosen version of SQL Server.
mean consistent
Choosing Azure for SQL opens other new possibilities, as well. For
and predictable
example, you can host larger SQL databases than any other cloud
workload with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, a highly scalable service tier for
performance SQL databases that adapts on-demand to your workload’s needs.
You can also harness the power of artificial intelligence to monitor
and secure your workloads. Trained on millions of databases, the
intelligent security and performance features in Azure SQL Database
mean consistent and predictable workload performance. Intelligent
performance tuning automatically adapts to the needs of your
application. Automatic threat detection identifies unusual log-in
attempts or potential SQL injection attacks. With features such as
these, you spend less time managing your database and more time
delivering innovative solutions.

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A global network
Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider –
offering the scale needed to bring applications closer to users around
the world, preserving data residency and offering comprehensive
compliance and resiliency options for customers. This frees your
teams to focus on building better applications rather than worrying
about performance or compliance.
Applications on Azure benefit from high availability, disaster recovery
and backup on Azure’s global network. You can build redundancies at
the virtual machine (VM), datacentre and regional levels based on
your business needs. And, stay compliant with your country’s or
region’s legal and regulatory requirements relative to the location of
your data.

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 Consistent hybrid capabilities
“Other cloud providers told us that this kind of hybrid-cloud
“Other cloud architecture was impossible to construct, but with Microsoft, we not
only accomplished it, but did so in a very performant way that wasn’t
providers told us
all that complicated to set up.”
that this kind of
Tom Phillips, Vice President of Data and Infrastructure,
hybrid-cloud
Ambit Energy
architecture was
Microsoft is committed to enabling a hybrid approach to cloud
impossible… we adoption. We understand that customers have business imperatives
not only to keep certain workloads and data on premises, and our goal is to
accomplished it, meet them where they are and prepare them for the future by
providing robust technology options that meet their needs.
but did so in a very
performant way Azure was designed and built to natively support hybrid
environments from its inception. Ever since, Microsoft has helped
that wasn’t all that
customers operate their hybrid environments seamlessly across on-
complicated to set premises, cloud and edge.
up.”
Tom Phillips, Vice
President of Data
and Infrastructure,
Ambit Energy

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 Enabling modern IT in hybrid scenarios
Microsoft is the only cloud provider in the market that offers a
Azure Stack, comprehensive set of hybrid solutions. Azure Stack, available in
92 countries, empowers you to build and run cloud-native
available in 92
applications with Azure services in your local datacentres or in
countries, disconnected locations. Microsoft also recently introduced Azure
empowers you to Stack HCI solutions so customers can run virtualised applications
build and run on-premises in a familiar way and enjoy easy access to off-the-shelf
Azure management services such as backup and disaster recovery.
cloud-native
To simplify hybrid IT management, we provide Windows Admin
applications with
Centre, a free, modern, browser-based application that allows you to
Azure services in manage Windows Servers on-premises, in Azure, or in other clouds.
your local Using Windows Admin Centre, you can access Azure management
datacentres or in services to perform tasks such as disaster recovery, backup, patching
and monitoring.
disconnected
locations
Fast networking is critical to success in hybrid environments. Azure
enables you to build extremely fast private connections between
Azure and local infrastructure, allowing both to and through access
using Azure ExpressRoute at bandwidths up to 100 Gbps. Azure
Azure enables you
Virtual WAN makes it possible to quickly add and connect thousands
to build extremely of branch sites by automating configuration and connectivity to
fast private Azure and for global transit across customer sites, using the
connections Microsoft global network.
between Azure Another key piece of the hybrid puzzle is identity. In fact, over 90% of
and local enterprise customers use Active Directory on-premises. With Azure,
customers can easily connect on-premises Active Directory with
infrastructure, Azure Active Directory to provide seamless directory services for all
allowing both to Office 365 and Azure services. Azure Active Directory gives users a
and through single sign-on experience across cloud, mobile and on-premises
applications and secures data from unauthorised access without
access using Azure
compromising productivity.
ExpressRoute at
Customers are also extending their hybrid environments to the edge
bandwidths up to so they can take on new business opportunities. Microsoft offers
100 Gbps Azure Data Box Edge, a cloud managed compute platform for
containers at the edge, enabling you to accelerate local machine
learning workloads and data processing. Additionally, we recently
announced Azure SQL Database Edge, enabling developers to create
a SQL database and run the same code on-premises, in the cloud, or
at the edge.

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 The most cost-effective choice for many
customers
“… Using Azure While innovation has supplanted cost savings as the primary driver of
Hybrid Benefit, cloud migration for many businesses, moving to the cloud needs to
make sense for your bottom line. Azure offers benefits that can result
we’ll be able to in substantial cost savings in many cases.1
reduce our overall
The Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and SQL Server is one
costs by up to example. It is a pricing benefit for customers who have licences with
82%.” Software Assurance, which helps maximise the value of existing on-
Jeff Brady, Sr. premises Windows Server or SQL Server licence investments when
migrating to Azure. Eligible customers can save up to 40% on Azure
Program Manager,
Virtual Machines (Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS), and save up to
Allscripts 55% on Azure SQL Database (Platform as a Service, or PaaS) and SQL
Server on Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS) with Azure Hybrid Benefit.
Combining these benefits with Azure reservation pricing can increase
savings even further. Giving us visibility into your one-year or three-
year resource needs in advance allows us to be more efficient. In
return, we pass these savings onto you as discounts of up to 72%
compared to pay-as-you-go pricing for select Azure services. You can
save up to 80% when you combine reservation savings with Azure
Hybrid Benefit.
“Azure Hybrid Benefit is very important to us for controlling our costs
for our long-running, 24/7/365 applications. Using Azure Hybrid
Benefit, we’ll be able to reduce our overall costs by up to 82%.”
Jeff Brady, Sr. Program Manager, Allscripts
In addition, Azure cost management, free to all Azure customers,
helps you monitor and optimise what you spend in Azure. Not only
do all these savings help your bottom line, but they also free up the
budget you need to innovate with cloud services, create new
business value and compete more effectively in your industry.

1Actual savings may vary based on region, instance type or usage. 13

Accelerate innovation with Azure
As you plan your migration of SQL Server and Windows Server
workloads to the cloud, consider the potential benefits of choosing
Azure as your destination. Intelligent security and broad compliance
capabilities help you protect your data. Managed services, a global
network and reduced administrative burden put the focus on
innovation. And, for hybrid workloads, only Azure provides a
complete solution. All in a highly cost-effective platform, designed
and built to be the best for applications that rely on Windows Server
and SQL Server.
Learn more about the benefits of choosing Azure as your cloud
platform.

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