Case Study: Somerset County Council achieves faster, lower-cost backup and recovery with Microsoft Corporation Azure hybrid cloud

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

Somerset County Council, a large UK local government agency, needed a more flexible and cost-effective way to protect mission-critical systems after its old backup platform reached end of life and struggled with scalability, recovery testing, and capacity. Working with Microsoft Corporation, the council looked for a hybrid cloud approach using Azure services to improve resilience and meet budget constraints.

Microsoft Corporation implemented a hybrid cloud backup and storage solution using Azure Backup, Azure StorSimple, and Azure ExpressRoute, with Microsoft Consulting Services helping design the rollout. The council now backs up 2,790 daily system streams and is expanding to 420 servers, restores files and systems faster, and can provision backup infrastructure in a week or less instead of 4 to 6 weeks. The result has been stronger agility, simpler operations, and six-digit cost savings, with significantly lower running costs than the previous solution.

Somerset County Council

Andy Kennell

ICT Operations Manage