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Halving a licensing bill across 110 SQL Servers
The project had already stalled once under an offshore provider. What restarted it was not more hands, it was an assessment that said which of several thousand findings actually mattered and in what order.
SQL Server licensing
50%
Saved per annum, from what the assessment found about the design of the system rather than from new hardware.
- SQL Servers in scope
- 110
- Deployment
- Hybrid
- Baseline data collection
- 6 to 8 weeks
In short
What happened
A large international pharmaceutical company ran 110 Microsoft SQL Servers across a hybrid cloud and on-premises estate, and wanted its performance improved and the estate prepared for future cloud migrations. It had first gone to an offshore managed services provider, and several critical issues stalled the project. Fortified Data began with a data tier assessment, which returned thousands of items and then prioritized them by impact and risk. The findings about the system's design allowed the company's SQL Server licensing costs to be cut by 50 percent per annum, and availability across the data ecosystem increased.
50%
Of the annual SQL Server licensing bill, saved on findings about how the estate was designed rather than on new hardware.
Fortified Data case study, 2025
110
Microsoft SQL Servers in a hybrid cloud and on-premises estate, assessed before any change was made to it.
Fortified Data case study, 2025
6 to 8 weeks
Of data collection to establish the baseline, which is what makes an assessment a measurement rather than an opinion.
Fortified Data case study, 2025
Why the first attempt stalled
The pharmaceutical company initially sought migration assistance from a large offshore managed services provider that was already handling its database managed services. Several critical issues stalled the project, at which point it came to Fortified Data. The constraint that shaped everything afterwards was that outages were not available: the company provides regulatory and technical services to healthcare product companies around the world, and the optimization had to happen without taking systems down.
The assessment revealed a great many optimization improvements, challenges and opportunities in the SQL Server environment. That is the normal result and it is also the problem: a list of thousands of findings is not a plan. The improvements needed careful prioritization, impact analysis and precise execution, which is what makes a migration project succeed while outages are being avoided.
The recommendations grouped into five kinds of gain: scalability, performance improvements, reduced cost, operational efficiencies and capacity planning. Licensing turned out to sit inside the fourth of those rather than being a line item anybody had gone looking for.
The engagement, in order
How a list of thousands became a plan
A holistic review of the data environment is the first step of any major project. What follows it is the part that decides whether the review was worth running.
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Align the data with the business strategy first
Fortified Data began by collaborating closely with the pharmaceutical company through a series of meetings, to understand the business strategies the data was supposed to be serving. Without that, a prioritized list is prioritized against nothing in particular.
Findings ranked later against what the company was trying to do, not against severity alone. -
Six to eight weeks
Collect the baseline
Every data tier assessment includes data collection from the server environment, which provides representative levels of database activity, challenges and opportunities. The full process of establishing baseline data for complete analysis takes about six to eight weeks of collection, because a week of data describes a week.
Representative activity levels across all 110 servers. -
Analyze, including what a human would not see
A data tier assessment typically returns many results, and in this case thousands of items. Fortified Data's assessment also uses machine learning to predict and detect anomalies in the data environment, which is the part that finds the thing nobody thought to look for.
Thousands of findings, including anomalies nobody had flagged. -
Prioritize by impact and by risk
Fortified Data established a prioritization-led strategy with risk analysis and actionable items, chosen for meaningful impact on system performance and on the health of the wider data ecosystem. This is the step that turns an assessment into something that can be executed without outages.
An ordered plan, with the outage risk of each item stated. -
Execute, stability before performance
The improvement strategy was shared with the company and then delivered, and the order inside the delivery matters as much as the order before it: availability across the data ecosystem was raised first, and only once the system was more stable did the work turn to performance.
Availability up across the ecosystem, then performance improved on top of it.
50%
What the assessment was worth
Of the annual SQL Server licensing bill, removed on the strength of what the assessment found about how the system was designed. Fortified Data's further recommendation was that an organization creating data at this volume should assess semi-annually or quarterly rather than annually.
What changed
- SQL Server licensing halved per annumThe most impactful finding, and it came out of the design of the system rather than out of buying or retiring anything.
- Performance improved on a stable baseStability came first deliberately. Tuning an environment that is still falling over measures the wrong thing.
- A different assessment cadenceFortified Data recommended moving from annual to semi-annual or quarterly assessment, which is what most enterprise organizations creating large volumes of data need.
Three ways to work with us
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Database consulting and projects
Project-based engagements for migrations, performance tuning, data modernization, business intelligence, and high availability and disaster recovery.
When did you last measure your licensing against your workload?
Licensing is the line item most often assumed to be fixed, and on an estate of a hundred servers it rarely is. An assessment measures what the workload actually needs before anyone argues about editions.
Let us show you what's possible.