Reduce Costs, Increase Versatility: How to Keep Your Database Future-Ready

Businesses have more databases running than ever before. These fast-growing files and their associated workloads remain the engines that drive most business systems, analytics and leadership decision-making processes. IDC’s recent Global DataSphere Forecast, 2021-2025, expects a vigorous CAGR of 23%, with total business data soaring from 64.2 zettabytes of data in 2020 to over 181 zettabytes by 2025.

Big data is no longer the preserve of industry giants – all businesses will rely on it as automation and data-from-data take over the traditional databases storing parts to customer information, data logs to images and video. Businesses, specifically database administrators, need to ensure their databases are fit for growth and analytics use in an era where data wants to be free and users expect greater access as part of data democracy efforts.

Few businesses can or will choose the cost of storing that level of data locally, as data center efficiency tails off. As a result, the cloud is fast becoming the destination of choice for all types of data. As business IT evolves from siloed databases to connected and interactive cloud solutions, data teams and database managers need to establish the risks and cost of migrations.

They must also ensure databases are secure and ensure there’s headroom for future growth in a changing IT landscape across hybrid clouds and as-a-service. 2025 is only a few years away, and as smart factories powered by 5G networks on the edge and IoT devices churning out ever more data, there will be databases everywhere, with the collected highlights and any errant information hitting urgent dashboards within seconds to maintain operations and efficiency.

Databases are fast evolving from user-entered data to the automatic entry of large volumes of big data. Consider factory databases measuring temperatures and pressures, production quantities and tolerances, and linking to supply chain and distribution databases. Alternatively, there’s cloud service customer databases, where users, their details and every interaction with them and associated metadata are cataloged.

These huge datasets only need concern managers when there’s an outlier event triggering a dashboard warning, but whatever the business, all enterprises need to enable their current databases to thrive in these kinds of environments.

Protect and grow your data

There are services and tools for pretty much every aspect of IT, improving or monitoring security, performance or delivering deeper diagnostics or analytics. When it comes to databases, beyond the performance-on-steroids megastructures of giant enterprises like Amazon, many businesses are content to let their databases chug away, doing the job but not extracting the maximum benefit in terms of information or performance.

Keeping your database services up to date and the database content accurate and free of digital clutter is key to strong performance. This is especially vital when moving from on-premises or data to hybrid cloud solutions (PDF) that change the nature of storage and access.

From dockers and containers to microservices and hybrid clouds, the way access to databases is changing will also mean businesses need to be ready to adjust.

Seeing through the fog with Foglight

The advantage of Quest’s Foglight solution is through the provision of broad monitoring and deep optimization for enterprises that are turning to hybrid and other cloud solutions. Foglight provides performance monitoring and diagnostic capabilities wherever the database is stored, be it spread between servers, virtual machines, containers or various clouds.

Foglight supports the efforts of IT leaders and their teams to overcome the challenges of modernizing databases and moving to or from the diverse technical infrastructures across cloud and virtualization. It helps teams achieve this through benchmarking of performance. determining required resources and ensuring optimal uptime and fast resolution of any issues.

Supporting Amazon AWS, Azure SQL, MongoDB and many more platforms, IT leaders and database managers can focus on delivering business results while Foglight monitors the various databases in the background and ensures they’re delivering the right results into business applications.

All that information is visible from a single console, allowing admins and DevOps teams to focus on delivering business benefits from that data and ensuring databases will work with future applications and services. They also provide alerts to any potential issues long before they could cause downtime and angry users.

The complexity of hybrid clouds, the risk of expert knowledge moving on as team members leave and the ever-present threat of hacks or costly downtime mean that an automated overview and management tool is essential to keep those databases in shape.

Data growth will continue – be prepared

Data growth and complexity will only continue across enterprises and the customers that they service, while governments, smart cities and mega-corporations will spit out and consume even more data.

While the collection, analysis and storage of data will get smarter, aggregating much of it into manageable pieces, there will still be huge datasets, especially around AI tools that need managing and securing. And while databases will never be the most exciting part of the cloud, they underpin so much of the work and effort that creates value and drives profits for all firms.