Case Study: Paychex achieves scalable, always-on payroll performance with Microsoft Corporation Azure SQL Database

Paychex relies on Azure SQL Database to handle explosive growth

Paychex, a human capital management firm serving millions of workers across the U.S. and Europe, needed a more reliable way to run its business-critical payroll and time-tracking apps as demand grew. Its on-premises infrastructure was becoming costly and hard to manage, and even brief outages could affect thousands of clients. Paychex turned to Microsoft Corporation and Azure SQL Database to support its Paychex Flex Time application.

Microsoft Corporation helped Paychex migrate from on-premises systems to the cloud using Azure SQL Database elastic pools, enabling each customer to be isolated in its own database while sharing resources efficiently. The solution improved availability, reduced the need for new hardware, and allowed Paychex to scale rapidly with triple-digit year-over-year growth; today, tens of thousands of customers are hosted on Azure. Paychex also now releases updates every two weeks without customers noticing, while engineers focus more on product improvements than infrastructure management.

Paychex

Dave Wilson

Sr. Director of IT Infrastructure and Architecture