Not a list of logos. Eleven engagements, each with the thing that was wrong, the size of the environment it was wrong in, and the number that moved once it was fixed.
A development instance was licensed as SQL Server Enterprise Edition rather than Developer Edition, and correcting it removed $35,000 a year of recurring cost. The same configuration audit found a high-risk high-availability design behind race operations and reduced it with an interim workaround while the permanent fix was planned.
An assessment of 110 SQL Servers at an international pharmaceutical company identified enough optimization and consolidation to halve the annual licensing bill, and availability across the data ecosystem rose with it. Licensing is the line item most often assumed to be fixed, and on an estate this size it rarely is.
Storage at a leading mortgage technology platform was rebuilt rather than expanded: five critical databases compressed from 11.19 TB to 4.22 TB, a further 2.5 TB reclaimed by index compression, 3.7 TB negotiated at no cost, and disaster recovery moved off VM restore to Azure blob storage.
A large North American insurer taken from SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server 2019: 3,500 databases and 300 applications upgraded, encrypted and migrated in 128 days, with no loss of service and no application failure. An end-of-life deadline at that scale is usually met by exception; this one was met by planning.
A sprawling 100-server SQL Server estate at a $35 billion asset manager was consolidated to 25, and only then migrated to Azure. Monthly cloud consumption came down by $65,000 and stayed down. The consolidation came first deliberately: migrating the sprawl would have moved the cost rather than removed it.
Ransomware reached production at a fleet technology company. Emergency response, SQL Server reconstruction and coordinated work with the other vendors involved brought a 3TB environment back in 11 hours rather than the weeks the alternative would have taken, with data integrity intact throughout the restoration.
A healthcare technology platform moved from reactive support to proactive optimization, improving critical stored procedure performance by 90.48 percent and expanding onto PostgreSQL. A cloud migration that would have cost revenue was caught before it ran, while 24/7 reliability held for the clinical communications depending on it.
A scalable Azure Synapse solution for an international pharmaceutical company, with automated FTP file management, multi-stage data loading and Power BI integration. Reporting time fell from three business days to under one, and departments gained access to both the raw and the transformed data rather than to whichever extract reached them.
A Cincinnati healthcare clearinghouse had critical SQL Server query lag and progressive performance degradation. Ongoing optimization under a managed service replaced the firefighting, and the stability and headroom that followed released the internal IT team back to work on the business rather than on the database.
A global financial software platform handling tax filing, payroll and billions of dollars in transactions for millions of users had already attempted a cloud migration and failed. Fortified Data identified the performance bottlenecks behind the failure, downsized the environment and completed the move to AWS in 14 days, clear of peak season.
Persistent deadlocking and 50-minute delays in a global pharmaceutical company's data warehouse. An assessment traced it to SQL Server resource allocation and inadequate indexing, and the remediation reached more than 200 SSIS ETL packages. The nightly blocking chains stopped and warehouse performance was restored.
Fortified Data publishes eleven client case studies, each stating what changed in a specific database environment and by how much. They include SQL Server licensing cut by 50 percent across 110 servers, five databases compressed from 11.19 TB to 4.22 TB with no hardware bought, 3,500 databases and 300 applications migrated in 128 days with no loss of service, a 3TB environment rebuilt in 11 hours after a ransomware attack, and reporting time reduced from three business days to under one on a rebuilt data warehouse. Seven of the eleven have a page of their own. The engagements span healthcare, financial services, pharmaceutical, insurance, mortgage technology, fleet technology and professional motorsports.
Which kind of engagement produced a result matters more than which industry it happened in. A 90 percent performance improvement means one thing if it came from a one-off assessment and something else entirely if it came from eighteen months of ongoing management, and a reader deciding how to buy needs to know which. The four groups below the listing say which produced what.
These are summaries. Fortified Data does not publish the full engagement detail behind these eleven, so where one of them looks close to your situation the useful next step is a conversation about that specific engagement rather than a download.
What produced them
The same outcome means different things depending on how it was reached. These are the four routes behind the eleven, and how many came from each.
Four of the eleven. Monitoring that had something attached to it: a licensing misconfiguration caught before a race weekend, storage rebuilt instead of expanded, query lag ended rather than escalated. None of these was a project anybody scoped, which is the argument for the arrangement.
Two of the eleven, and both were cost or performance problems the incumbent team had stopped being able to see: half a licensing bill across 110 servers, and nightly deadlocks traced to resource allocation and indexing rather than to the 200 packages being blamed.
Four of the eleven, including the two largest. An end-of-life deadline met at 3,500 databases, a failed cloud migration rescued in 14 days, a 100-server estate consolidated before it moved, and a warehouse rebuilt rather than tuned.
One of the eleven, and the one nobody plans for. Ransomware in production, a 3TB environment reconstructed in 11 hours, and other people's vendors coordinated in the middle of it. This is the engagement that starts with a phone call rather than a statement of work.
How to read these
Each entry opens with what changed and by how much. A case study that opens on the client's sector and reaches the result in the sixth paragraph is a brochure with a number hidden in it, and it wastes the time of the only reader who matters here.
110 servers, 3,500 databases, 200 ETL packages, 3TB restored, 12TB recovered. The figure describing how large the environment was sits next to the figure describing what improved, because a percentage with no denominator behind it is a decoration.
A cloud migration that had already collapsed once, and ransomware that reached production. Those two are worth more than the clean engagements, because they describe what happens after the plan has gone wrong, which is the condition most people are actually in when they call.
Say which one and what it reminded you of. That is a more useful opening than a general enquiry, because the engagement that produced the outcome is the thing we can talk about specifically. If you would rather start with your own numbers than ours, an assessment produces them.
Let us show you what's possible.