About
The word “migration” can mean different things to different people, depending on their situation. Here are some examples of where we can help.
Consolidation
Your SQL Server estate may have sprawled over time, with instances supporting applications having been deployed without a cohesive strategy. There comes a point where you have to rationalise your SQL backends to reduce complexity around upgrades, patching, licencing and data centre footprint. If you’re in the cloud, this could have a significant immediate cost reductions.
Scale Out
As the amount of data help within SQL Server increases, workload contention can impact your applications, and therefore, your business. Optimising workloads at the instance layer can only take you so far. There comes a time when you have to scale out to meet the business need, either re-actively due to performance issues or proactively as part of a strategic plan.
End of Life
SQL Server versions have a limited shelf life, and it is possible that the version you know and love has gone out of support. SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 went out of support with Microsoft in July 2019. Many people are still running SQL Server 2008 R2 or earlier versions. People can be running legacy versions of SQL Server for a variety of reasons, but for those versions out of support Microsoft are no longer releasing security patches, customers might be thinking of migrating and upgrading SQL Server because of the associated security and compliance risks.
New Features
New versions of SQL Server bring with it new features and functionality that can help you ultimately deliver digital transformation within your business. It might be that you want to make use of new features that are available in later releases of SQL Server to improve application performance or more secure your data. There maybe analytical features that allow you to ‘refine’ your data and gain invaluable business insight from it. Perhaps the ‘Always-on Availability Groups’ technology used for implementing database high availability and disaster recovery, released in SQL Server 2012 is something that you want to use to help deliver a stable, reliable and protected data platform. Or it might be ‘In-Memory’ tables introduced into SQL Server 2014. Or you may want to integrate ‘R code’ inline with your SQL code, which you can do from SQL Server 2016. If you are running a legacy SQL Server version and want to use these features, and you want these features will deliver value you will need to upgrade your underlying data platform.