Justin Hurst, Field CTO, Nutanix APJ, tells us five key reasons organizations across Asia-Pacific need to consider DBaaS.
The sheer volume of data being created by organizations is staggering. Once upon a time, a petabyte was considered a remarkable amount of data – which in reality it still is: a petabyte is the equivalent of roughly 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
However, these days it’s common for organizations to have tens, or even hundreds, of petabytes of data to manage – often filed across multiple databases – requiring significant amounts of storage and resources.
However, when databases are managed by legacy systems, they become increasingly burdensome, with slow response times and inconsistent performance, and they become plagued with inefficiencies.
According to IDC research, approximately 75% of database deployments remain on-premises. An unsurprising figure, given that organizations want to keep their most critical IP close by. But as businesses focus on Digital Transformation, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offers a simplified way of configuring and maintaining an organization’s databases.
Here are five key reasons organizations across Asia-Pacific and Japan need to consider DBaaS:
Reduced downtime: Security is an ever increasing threat for business, with the number of cyberattacks having risen dramatically since the pandemic.
In legacy environments, patching security vulnerabilities can result in lengthy periods of downtime, which according to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Nutanix, equated to US$35,000 per hour in losses from productivity, revenue loss and downstream impact for a composite organization.
However, when shifting to DBaaS, companies gain access to a single management console, which means they can automatically distribute patches across databases faster than ever. In many cases, patches can be made in under an hour.
Slash budgets and resourcing: IDC research also shows that almost three quarters (73%) of organizations use different tools and processes for their on-premises databases versus their cloud databases.
Not only does this result in the company purchasing redundant tools and having to maintain them, it also results in staffing inefficiencies, with database managers spending hours creating and maintaining databases.
In fact, the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study reports that database administrator (DBA) teams often need to work overtime and on weekends in order to keep up.
According to the Forrester Consulting TEI study, this is overtime which was slashed by up to 50% for a composite organization simply by migrating to a simpler database management solution.
For India’s RBL Bank, a digital leader in India with more than 8.49 million customers and 1,631 offices, their returns were significant.
Leveraging Nutanix Database Service allowed them to cut provisioning times by 90% and reduce critical clones creations of databases for key customers to 4 hours instead of 1-2 days, all while saving 90Tb of database storage.
Improve talent acquisition: Already, the Forrester study shows that interviewed companies found it challenging to hire technologists with the specialized skill sets to maintain legacy databases.
Each time a veteran employee leaves or retires, it prompts a knowledge leak, creates a transition gap and causes quality issues.
Now, with Generation Z entering the workforce – a generation of digital natives who expect technology to work rapidly and seamlessly – organizations must be able to offer the most flexible and easy to use cloud-based technologies to attract and retain the next generation of talent.
Not only are younger, more digitally savvy employees now entering the workforce, but the labour market across Asia-Pacific and Japan is tightening, resulting in organizations planning salary budget increases for 2022.
Talent acquisition and retention is becoming increasingly competitive, and companies who refuse to let go of more outdated or clunky systems will fail to attract the best and brightest.
Gain rich customer insights: Consumer intelligence is playing an increasing role in strategic business decisions as organizations aim to stay one step ahead of ever-changing consumer behaviors. Databases are a gold mine of customer data, and emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), can help businesses make sense of this data; detecting patterns and anomalies that would be impossible to detect manually.
However, AI and ML technologies work best in the cloud – deploying them across on-prem databases wouldn’t work in the same way. For businesses that want to track real-time customer behaviors and stay on top of trends, migrating databases to the cloud and deploying DBaaS not only improves efficiencies, but provides invaluable customer insights.
Fast-track Digital Transformation: According to IDC’s 2022 predictions, at least half of the Asia Pacific economy will be based on, or influenced by digital by the end of this year. Furthermore, direct Digital Transformation investments will make up 70% of all ICT investments by the end of 2024.
Not only does deploying DBaaS help to improve operational efficiencies, it also helps businesses digitally transform across other areas of the business. App development teams in charge of building new systems and processes need to work off the most up-to-date, live databases – not duplicate versions that are constantly out of date.
Databases of the future
Databases are critical to company success, but as we move into 2022 and beyond, data volumes will only continue to explode. The exponential data growth will force organizations to modernize and simplify their database management systems – whether on-premises, in the private cloud, or in hybrid cloud – finding new ways to improve efficiency, save costs and improve employee experience.
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