High Availibility Solution to send data to multiple locations
Depending on your level of expertise, I would suggest you - Logshipping or AlwaysON AG.


  1) log shipping because we need to be able to show log backups to auditors and store them for years. Please correct me if I'm wrong but log shipping wouldn't let us create separate log backups.


Logshipping. It allows you to logship your databases to as many secondaries as you want.

You can choose standby option on secondary that will allow you to read data when the logs are not being restored. Think of it as reporting ONLY.

You can take COPY_ONLY log backups that wont break your log chain (or restrict users to COPY ONLY backups) and you can archive your log backups (depending on the frequency you have set up) - so that your auditors can store them. Just dont delete them or have a higher retention period in clean up job of logshipping.


  4) I never worked with other HA techniques so for example AlwaysOn or clusters is a one big unknown for me. I am happy to learn though as long as someone points me in the right direction.


You can implement AlwaysON availablity groups and happily take your Full, diffs and T-Log backups.

The important thing is that there is a learning curve for you. All the servers should be part of the same windows cluster, there is DNS dependency, you application should be able to use the new provider and connection string, etc. Since you are using Enterprise editon, this is something that you can try as a Proof of Concept and once you are confident, you can transition from logshipping to AlwaysON.

Note: We are currently transitioning from Logshipping to AlwaysON for our huge environment of 1000+ databases being hosted in different continents of the world.

Some references to get you started on ALwaysON part :


SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn
Getting Started with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)
AlwaysOn Availability Groups
for SQL Server 2012, 2014, and 2016