The Azure SQL family: Innovation and value in the cloud

How businesses respond in times of uncertainty is as varied as the businesses themselves. Many slow down operations to operate more cost-effectively, while others lean into new opportunities that didn’t exist before. Regardless of how you respond, ensuring your organization can cost-effectively adapt and scale to rapidly changing conditions is key.

When it comes to migrating your data, you have a variety of options to consider, and it’s important to have the flexibility to choose a path that helps you respond to uncertainty in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Azure SQL is here to help.

Introducing Azure SQL

Azure SQL is a family of fully managed, secure, and intelligent SQL database services that support a wide range of application patterns, from re-hosting and modernizing existing SQL Server workloads to modern cloud application development.

Because the entire Azure SQL family is built upon the same SQL Server database engine, you can migrate applications with ease and continue to use the tools, languages, and resources you’re familiar with. You’ll discover that your skills and experience transfer easily to the cloud, as the innovative features in Azure SQL help you operate more efficiently and save money along the way.

Azure SQL helps you do more

Azure SQL has options for any budget. You can choose managed services that are automatically patched, updated, and backed-up for you, so you can refocus resources onto higher priorities. A recent Forrester study found operational and financial benefits of modernizing applications on Azure SQL, citing a three-year 238 percent return on investment and up to a 40 percent increase in database administrator (DBA) productivity, among other benefits.1

Azure SQL also helps you stay agile in an ever-changing world by reducing your costs and simplifying performance management. Serverless compute, for example, continuously right-sizes resources to meet workload demand. Hyperscale storage is built on a flexible, cloud native architecture that allows it to grow as needed, rapidly scaling up to 100 TB. Built-in AI powers intelligent features like automatic tuning and Advanced Threat Protection, which maintain peak performance and data protection on your behalf.

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines offers similar efficiency and cost-effectiveness with Azure BlobCache, which is automatically provisioned for Azure Marketplace images and gives fast, free reads for customers. Given that typical SQL Server workloads are read-heavy, this provides tremendous savings.

Azure SQL comes with industry leading offers

In addition to the operational and financial benefits that come with managed services, Azure SQL can help reduce your upfront costs with industry-leading pricing and special offers, such as:

◉ Azure Hybrid Benefit — If you have SQL Server and Windows licenses with active Software Assurance, you can reuse those licenses in the cloud and save up to 82 percent2 off pay-as-you-go rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.

◉ Reservation pricing — Get more cloud for less cost when you commit upfront to a one- or three-year term. With reservation pricing, you can save up to 80 percent3 versus pay-as-you-go pricing, and you can exchange or cancel unused reservations at any time.

◉ Azure Dev/Test Pricing — Use your Visual Studio subscriptions to get discounted pricing and Azure credits for non-production scenarios, with savings up to 55 percent off pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance and Ubuntu Linux rates on SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

Source: microsoft.com