Capita Reading Cloud harnesses scalability with Azure
Around 8,500 school libraries throughout the UK use Capita Reading Cloud to allow them to track resources and help students. However, the company previously hosted its Microsoft SQL Server databases with third-party suppliers, making scaling quickly enough to meet demand shifts difficult.
To run its library management system (LMS), Capita Reading Cloud hosted its infrastructure in third-party datacenters, with over 10,000 databases on two instances of Microsoft SQL Server in a failover cluster.
Christopher Keighley, Infrastructure Manager at Capita Reading Cloud, explained that: “It took us too long to scale. The environment was designed to cope with peak demand, but it was rigid—we didn’t have the elasticity to quickly scale as demand ebbs and flows over the course of the school day.”
On top of this, it couldn’t guarantee 100 per cent backup recovery and was incapable of restoring Reading Cloud to a specific failure point in time. Keighley also explained that it was time-consuming to manage its third-party environment and that reacting to demand often took an hour.
As its hosting contract neared expiration, Capita Reading Cloud saw that they could have a more scalable, cost-effective solution with Microsoft Azure and migrated its SQL Server databases to Microsoft Azure SQL Database’s elastic database pools. This allowed it to reduce its management effort and helped automate real-time elastic scaling.
Working with Azure Database Migration Service, Capita Reading Cloud migrated weekly batches of 400 databases, moving all 10,000 within 10 months. Collaborating with Microsoft helped refine and streamline the database migration, making it as easy as possible.
Following the migration, Capita Reading Cloud now utilises an environment that is easier and quicker to scale, simpler to manage and more cost-effective to operate. As Keighley says: “With Azure SQL Database, we only pay for what we need, when we need it, which means we can keep fees down—and pass more value onto libraries and our customers.”
