Wolters Kluwer saves time with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Human-intensive database management

Tax is a notoriously complex environment to navigate—so it’s no wonder that organizations turn to experts like Wolters Kluwer to provide the tools and services they need to understand, aggregate, and monitor their tax position. CCH Integrator transforms tax compliance and reporting across multiple entities and jurisdictions, increasing control, reducing risk, and freeing the tax function to focus on greater things. With more than 15,000 users worldwide, CCH Integrator has high availability demands, requiring the use of up to 300 Microsoft SQL Server databases.

CCH Integrator's customers span 80 countries, so Wolters Kluwer must contend with multiple languages, currencies, and user bases. To reduce the time and pressure associated with administrative tasks and improve agility, availability, and scalability, Wolters Kluwer decided to migrate CCH Integrator to Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instance in multiple regions.

Simpler service delivery and recovery

Wolters Kluwer recognized the value in outsourcing this non-core competency. Due to a compressed schedule, the company needed to migrate its application platform quickly, efficiently, and securely, so it decided to take a platform as a service approach and adopt SQL Managed Instance. 

“When considering our timeline, and the platform’s capabilities, scalability, and ease of use, SQL Managed Instance was the obvious choice,” says Terence Danker, Principal Enterprise Architect, Architecture & Engineering Services (AES), Global Business Services, at Wolters Kluwer. “By working closely with Microsoft and using the Database Migration Assistant tool, we were able to deploy a geographically diverse environment in less than 30 days.”

“We like that Microsoft fully manages SQL Managed Instance and that the Azure global network is so efficient,” says Lindley Scott, Head of Service Delivery – Tax & Accounting, Asia Pacific, at Wolters Kluwer. “We saw how we could use the service to help reduce management overhead, easily host CCH Integrator in new regions, and improve our recovery times.”

With its previous infrastructure, platform team members were sometimes required to interject and manually oversee remote database mirroring processes. With SQL Managed Instance, the product automates database duplication for production and backup.

Recovery processes have been streamlined using SQL Managed Instance, according to Mike Gerrand, Director of Technology – Tax & Accounting, Asia Pacific, at Wolters Kluwer. “It provides a point in time database restore capability which is seamless. And pairing Azure datacenter regions also ensures backup protection against a datacenter outage.”  

As customer requirements grow, Wolters Kluwer can scale CCH Integrator organically using SQL Managed Instance, and it can also use the database service to scale elastically to meet significant peaks in demand, such as during tax seasons. “Every customer is different,” says Gerrand. “With SQL Managed Instance, we can meet customer resource demands regardless of location.”

“Azure SQL Managed Instance strikes the right balance by providing an agile and scalable solution, while allowing us to rapidly deploy a highly available and geographically redundant solution at scale,” says Danker. 

By early 2020, Wolters Kluwer had migrated nearly 300 SQL Server 2016 databases to 14 instances of SQL Managed Instance in its CCH Integrator production environment and 14 instances in a disaster recovery environment, across Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe, Canada, and the United States. It also takes advantage of the high availability of Azure and globally distributed Azure datacenters to help meet its clients’ strict data sovereignty requirements and expand its offering into new regions. 

“It’s so much easier to provision clients in new regions now,” says Scott. “We’re confident that with such broad datacenter availability through Microsoft, we can maintain data sovereignty.”

The platform team uses Azure ExpressRoute to help support disaster recovery scenarios using existing infrastructure and to provide secure private network connectivity between Azure regions.  

A welcome escape from the datacenter business

Now that Wolters Kluwer has relieved its IT staff from the business of patching, upgrading, and provisioning databases, the company can strengthen its focus on its own business—and its customers. “We have a lot less to worry about now,” says Scott. “With Azure SQL Managed Instance, CCH Integrator runs faster and more efficiently than ever before, and we continue to save time every day by eliminating routine admin chores.” 

“Improved performance and security are a big deal for our customers,” adds Gerrand. “We have a lot of confidence in Microsoft, and our customers appreciate that their data is hosted and safeguarded in Azure datacenters.”

Wolters Kluwer expects that as it moves forward with its new setup, it will save time, help drive innovation, and unlock new ways to enhance the CCH Integrator experience for its customers.

Find out more about CCH Integrator at its website and on Linkedin.

CCH Integrator is part of Wolters Kluwer a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide.