By Debbi Lyons, Director of Azure Relational Databases Product Marketing
The ability to effectively manage data is more critical than ever and increasingly complex — with organizations hosting data on-premises, at the edge, and across multiple clouds. With the increasing need for businesses to maximize existing resources, one thing is clear: Today’s organizations need a bridge to bring cloud innovation to data estate across all environments – a consistent and efficient experience for managing, governing and security data. That bridge is Microsoft’s Azure Arc and one customer, the World Bank, is already finding success with this solution.
The World Bank offers lending services in developing countries worldwide. The institution’s IT and security teams were using an inefficient, duplicative, and decentralized solution for network monitoring and management. “It was completely non-centralized. There were three, four different tools and places to go to monitor things,” said Chandra Kala Macha, Information Officer II, the World Bank. “Even the security office was using different software to monitor security complaints for all our servers,“ recalled Chandra. “It was very inefficient.”
Recognizing an opportunity to improve efficiency and reduce costs, the World Bank replaced its existing technology stack with a new solution based on Azure Arc. The centralized, single-pane-of-glass solution has dramatically improved efficiency and security while reducing operating costs. “We wanted to implement Azure Arc so we could utilize all the features and manage all our on-premises and cloud servers, including the AWS ones, from one location,” Chandra said. “With Azure Arc, we can manage everything at the operating level and on the SQL Server side as well — all from a single pane of glass. It’s made a huge difference in our efficiency.”
Bring enhanced manageability to SQL Server anywhere
At Microsoft, we are committed to bringing the latest Azure innovation to our customers wherever they are with Azure Arc. With SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc, our customers are able to maximize the value of their investments with technology that allows them to do more with less, regardless where they're running SQL workloads.
At Ignite 2023, we're proud to introduce a new set of enhanced manageability and security capabilities from SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc:
- With Monitoring for SQL Server, customers can gain critical insights into their entire SQL Server estate, optimize database performance and deliver fast diagnostic times;
- Customers can also now improve SQL Server business continuity and consistency by viewing and managing Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances, and backups directly from the Azure portal. This capability provides better visibility and an easier, more flexible way to configure critical database operations.
- Lastly, with Extended Security Updates as-a-service and automated patching, customers can always keep their SQL Server 2012 apps secure, compliant and up to date at all times.
Azure, Anywhere
For all the innovation customers are driving in the cloud, we recognize much of customer’s data remains on-premises. This is why Microsoft continues to invest heavily in ensuring customers can get the most from their entire data estate with Azure Arc. With the latest enhancements, we’re now providing a full suite of capabilities and benefits to our customers.
- Manage: View and manage an entire SQL Server estate in the Azure portal. With a single, unified view in Azure, customers are able to better manage inventory and licenses. Automatically evaluate SQL Server environments with Best Practices Assessment for performance, scalability, and business continuity, all with no additional cost.
- Govern: Microsoft Purview is a family of data governance, risk, and compliance solutions that can help organizations govern, protect, and manage their environments. With Azure Arc, SQL Server customers will have Purview access policies readily available for those on-premises environments to centralize insights and governance across their entire data estate.
- Secure: With Azure Arc, customers are also able to deploy the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Defender for Cloud to their SQL Server deployments on-premises or in multi-cloud environments to enhance the security posture of a customer’s SQL Server environments, no matter where they reside. Defender continuously scans and proactively identifies any vulnerabilities or attacks that are happening within SQL Server environments. This multi-layered security is made possible by Azure Arc, so data is protected both at the database engine level and by Azure security capabilities from the cloud.
Learn More:
- Monitor SQL Server in Azure portal with Azure Arc
- Inventory Always On availability groups and review status - SQL Server
- Restore to a point-in-time - SQL Server
- Manage automated backups for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server from Azure portal - SQL Server
- View Always On failover cluster instances - SQL Server
- Extended Security Updates for SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc