5 Business Benefits of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS)

Imagine being able to provision a database that is highly available and compliant, in an hour.  Now imagine being able to do that, and more, with a click of a button. Today’s technology is changing how databases are being managed, making such desires a reality.

Databases are the foundation of today’s businesses. Organizations are increasingly turning to data to help make better decisions, increase their speed to market, engage with customers, and better understand their markets.  As a result, many IT teams are faced with the challenge of trying to meet the demands of their business units and development teams.  Security, governance and compliance remain the most important concerns for today’s data managers and professionals.  There is a critical business need to rapidly respond to the fast-paced demands for data and IT environments, especially with the increased adoption of collaborative development operations (DevOps).  But manual database operations, processes and approval times hinder IT teams from responding to these urgent requests.  All of this leads to poor resource utilization of existing hardware and uncontrolled infrastructure and spending growth.

The high cost of a traditional, manual approach to database management is quickly becoming unsustainable. This chart from recent Dell EMC research shows the rapid, double-digit growth of database management activities. Is anyone’s IT budget growing at 40%? We need a fundamentally different approach that leverages automation to reduce labor costs and provides the ability to quickly respond to the business.

What’s the best way to tackle these challenges?

Cloud (private, public and hybrid) and Database as a Service (DBaaS) are two interlocking concepts that IT managers are considering to modernize, automate and transform their data centers. DBaaS can help IT teams modernize their database infrastructure and address their business drivers as follows:

• Virtualization
  Virtualization can increase IT agility, flexibility, and scalability while creating significant cost savings. Workloads are deployed faster, performance and availability increases, and operations become automated, resulting in IT that’s simpler to manage and less costly to own and operate.  Virtualization also makes better use of available resources.

• Standardization
  One of the biggest challenges is dealing with database sprawl with different versions and configuration of databases.  This makes managing and administrating a database very difficult and time consuming.  By implementing DBaaS, administrators can standardize how databases are built for each version and ensure that best practices are followed, making administrating the databases easier and less time consuming.

• Automation
  Being able to implement automation within DBaaS removes the manual processes, which are time consuming and prone to user errors.  Automation increases the stability of database environments and improves compliance and governance.  Automation reinforces the implementation of standards, enhancing agility and time-to-market.

• Self Service Lifecycle Management
  DBaaS creates a self-service catalog for users to provision and deactivate a database.  The catalog helps enforce governance and approval workflows for each database and maintains the lifecycle of a database.

• Monitoring and Metering
  As part of any DBaaS implementation, being able to monitor and meter each database is very important.  Monitoring an Oracle database is done through Oracle Enterprise Manager, which simplifies the administration of each database and the overall database environment.  Metering allows IT organizations to measure and charge groups based on usage, thus enabling better management of databases and control over license costs.

At Dell EMC Services, we’re working with a growing number of clients who are pursuing DBaaS to achieve their cost and agility objectives. If you find yourself pressured by the rising demand for database management and from the business for faster database operations, maybe now is the time for you to make DBaaS a priority for your IT organization. Learn more about Dell EMC’s DBaaS transformation services and Oracle Database as a Service on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

In my next blog I’ll be addressing the key elements that ensure a successful DBaaS implementation and I welcome any insight and first hand experiences you’d be willing to share.

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