Choosing Your Database Migration Path to Azure

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service that is comparable to a traditional on-premises SQL Server deployment, but greatly enhances SQL performance and robustness by making performance levels and storage capacity easily upgradable as well as providing standard high availability. Azure SQL Database delivers predictable performance at multiple service levels that provides dynamic scalability with no downtime, built-in intelligent optimization, global scalability and availability, and advanced security options — all with near-zero administration. These capabilities allow you to focus on rapid app development and accelerating your time to market, rather than allocating precious time and resources to managing virtual machines and infrastructure. Azure SQL Database currently resides in 38 data centers around the world, with more data centers coming online regularly, enabling you to run your database in a data center near you. With so many on-premises implementations at customer sites, how do you migrate from the traditional on-premises SQL Server implementation to modern Azure SQL Database technologies and benefit from what cloud database services can offer? This whitepaper will guide you through the thought process and steps required to migrate your database workloads from on-premises to Azure-based cloud services as well as SQL Server components such as SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Integration Services.