Whitepaper: The Business Value of Microsoft Azure SQL Database Services

Organizations continue to seek ways to optimize how they maintain and use data that fuels their businesses. With significant growth to data footprints in recent years, it has become more challenging for many organizations to balance the imperative for security and reliable access to their data and the cost and staff resources required to maintain more databases. Increasingly, database-as-a-service (DaaS) cloud services have emerged as a solution that can deliver the right mix of operational and cost efficiencies, reliability, and business enablement.

Microsoft customers interviewed for this study are using Azure SQL Database, Microsoft’s relational DaaS, to minimize operational costs and risk associated with maintaining databases to support their businesses. In addition, these organizations reported that they are better able to focus their resources on improving their core differentiated value proposition with Azure SQL Database. IDC calculates that these customers will achieve total five-year average discounted business benefits worth $18,784 per Azure SQL Database and a return on investment (ROI) of 406% by:

»     Minimizing the IT staff time needed to build, maintain, and manage databases

»     Reducing capital and operational costs associated with maintaining on-premise databases or using hosted environments that do not have standard cloud characteristics

»     Alleviating the burden that provisioning infrastructure can place on their business

»     Improving scalability and the ability to match database resources to business demand

»     Speeding up the time to market for databases and applications

»     Decreasing database-related application downtime