When it comes to building out a SQL Server infrastructure for high availability (HA), are there any cost advantages to staying on-prem vs. moving to the cloud? If you need SQL Server to be available at least 99.99% of the time, you’re going to need backup infrastructure that can take over immediately if the active instance of SQL Server suddenly goes offline – so it’s not as though moving to the cloud eliminates the cost of backup infrastructure.
But the cloud offers a far wider range of configuration options that can, in fact, save you money when building out a SQL Server infrastructure designed for HA. Let’s start with core configuration considerations. If you’re configuring for HA on-premises, you’ll want to build an infrastructure designed for automatic failover among compute and storage resources. That way, if the infrastructure supporting your active SQL Server instance becomes unavailable (for whatever reason), the active infrastructure will fail over to other infrastructure that can immediately take up the SQL Server load and continue to support your operations.