Case Study: Somerset County Council achieves continuous service availability and faster disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure

Local government adopts a hybrid cloud to ensure it’s always there for citizens

Somerset County Council, a large UK local authority, needed to replace an end-of-life, rack-based backup system that was costly, inflexible and unable to meet daily backup SLAs or support disaster-recovery testing—an unacceptable risk for mission-critical services used during emergencies (for example, flooding). The council sought a modern, government‑certified solution that fit budget and long‑term cloud strategy.

Somerset implemented a Microsoft hybrid cloud using Azure, Azure Backup Server, StorSimple and a 1‑Gbps ExpressRoute link to protect 2,790 daily backup streams (VMware VMs, SQL Server and other workloads), tier user data to StorSimple and retain backups in Azure for 30 days. The new setup speeds restores, lets IT provision backup infrastructure in a week (weeks faster than before), scales to about 420 servers, reduces management overhead and datacenter footprint, and delivered six‑digit cost savings while improving agility and continuity.

Somerset County Council

Dean Cridland

Senior IT Officer