Driving database as a service for business growth
Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa
Like their international peers, South African companies face many database challenges in an increasingly connected and data-driven business landscape. Businesses must contend with rising database management costs, manual-intensive processes prone to error, a lack of visibility on how resources are used, the inability to scale on demand, and a poor user experience. Even though we are not, by our DNA, a database company, we are increasingly being asked to help organisations overcome these challenges and optimise the management of their databases.
Imagine a world where the corporate database environment is standardised through best practices and automation to simplify everything from procurement and deployment to monitoring, management, and operations. Even better, this is possible despite the global shortage of skilled database specialists. All of this has culminated in the rise of database-as-a-service (DBaaS), a great way to reduce the costs associated with traditional database management and its complexity.
Making the move
Of course, the current database environment presents significant obstacles to just lift and shift to the cloud and benefit from DBaaS. IDC research shows that 73% of companies have different database management processes for on-premises and cloud deployments, with 75% of relational database management systems remaining hosted in private clouds.
Within this context, companies are increasingly frustrated by having to spend resources managing the life cycle of their databases, specifically their on-premises ones, instead of innovating and focusing on growing the business.
Existing database deployment models require continuous tuning to ensure they have at least an adequate level of performance. This results in slow provisioning, which also impacts the scalability of the database environment. Furthermore, databases store sensitive customer and business data, with companies struggling to ensure adequate security measures are in place to safeguard all touchpoints in the system, given the rise of the hybrid workforce.
Combining these concerns with increasing costs and a lack of agility to keep up with evolving business needs and the availability of advanced technology, technology leaders are embracing DBaaS and offloading the management of their databases to trusted service providers. In turn, businesses can look at enhancing internal operations to drive growth and identify new business models for a digital world.
Enter HCI
Deciding to go the DBaaS route is an essential step in the process of modernising the database environment. But this cannot happen effectively without improving the underlying infrastructure. This is where hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is crucial to deliver the required database performance without needing to fine-tune the environment constantly.
HCI not only delivers the performance required for transactional workloads, but the right cluster solution can deliver automatic performance optimisation. Scaling becomes a non-event as it happens in a non-disruptive way to eliminate any uncertainty that comes with capacity planning, especially for traditional environments.
Perhaps most importantly, HCI delivers self-healing resilience and automatic recovery from common failures. This is designed to ensure database availability while providing businesses with additional value-added features such as built-in snapshots, replication, and cloning capabilities. All this results in significantly simplified data protection, recovery, and management.
Remove bottlenecks
DBaaS empowers organisations to remove the manual processes that result in project bottlenecks and inevitable delays. These delays significantly impact customer satisfaction and employee efficiencies, which can spill over to potential revenue losses. One project delay can cause a snowball effect throughout the entire organisation that can put the organisation under even more pressure to perform. By eliminating this through DBaaS, the company gains complete visibility of all its processes to optimise any inefficiencies in real time.
Delivering flexibility
For example, a solution such as Nutanix Era enables a DBaaS model to assist companies in managing and operating their database ecosystem. It achieves this by creating standardisation across a company’s database environment while injecting the necessary capabilities to improve scalability and agility while boosting performance and reducing costs.
Beyond this, security is key for companies, especially in a tightly governed regulatory environment. Falling foul of the likes of GDPR and POPIA can result in significant financial fines and damage to the corporate reputation. Opting for DBaaS with the right partner can mitigate against this from happening. Being able to automate administration tasks and enable developers to self-service their business database requirements while integrating security as part of the design philosophy will provide companies with the environment they need to take their databases to the next level.
DBaaS is here to stay. Decision-makers must start examining how best to incorporate this approach into their existing database environment to get the required agility that the cloud brings. Why? You can save time and money and buy your DBAs back the time they need to do the things that really matter – manage your databases.