Database as a service (DBaaS) is a cloud-based solution that allows customers to store and retrieve data from a database management system using a subscription service. The service provider installs, configures, and maintains the software and hardware infrastructure.
Why is Database as a Service Important?
Using database as a service, a business can gain immediate productive insights from their data assets because they don’t have to wait for IT to procure software and hardware and install and configure these. The service provider reduces the burden of making the database secure and stable and takes care of tasks such as patches, upgrades, and backups. Services offered can also help minimize daily operational tasks such as query optimization, table and index management, and application tuning.
What are the Benefits of Database as a Service?
The following is a list of benefits associated with DBaaS:
- Pay-as-you-go subscription pricing uses operational budgets, so you are only billed for the resources you consume. Vendors often sell credits upfront in exchange for discounted rates. This model is popular with smaller businesses and may meet the needs of departments in larger enterprises with small budgets.
- IT management is significantly reduced with a managed service model, so organizations benefit from the lower administration overhead DBaaS offers.
- Platform choice. DBaaS vendors often have a choice of cloud platforms for deployment, which is important if you have existing data lakes in a particular cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
- On-premises databases require a hardware upgrade when they outgrow existing servers. Cloud-based database services can provision additional servers and storage as needed. As user populations increase, cloud services can provision additional servers to maintain end-user service times.
- Outsourcing database services allows a business to focus more on areas that differentiate them as a brand. Database management is a generic business function that can easily be managed by a third party, freeing internal IT to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Cloud providers manage most low-level systems management tasks, so your IT and database teams spend less time keeping the service available, applying maintenance, and tuning.
- The cloud provider takes care of software upgrades and patches, which means you immediately benefit from the latest features and get faster protection from security vulnerabilities.
- A database service can be in production in an hour so that a business can jump on unexpected growth opportunities.
Potential Challenges
- Regulatory requirements can prohibit cloud deployment for data that must be kept on-premises. In many cases, a virtual private connection that keeps the customer data on the premises and invisible to the database service provider can help with this requirement.
- Cost variability can be a problem with a database as a service. If an application attracts large numbers of users in some months, such as holiday shopping and tax times versus others, bills can go way up. Features such as managing idle timeout and scheduling starting, stopping, and scaling the environment help reduce costs for variable processing.
- Data portability must be considered. If you have standardized on a cloud that falls out of favor, you need to be able to move to another one easily. Many database as a service solutions support multiple clouds, so there is no vendor lock-in.
Database as a Service Use Cases
DevOps
Database as a service is ideal to use in a sandbox for development and testing. It can rapidly spin databases up and down as needed, lowering database administration expertise requirements.
License Auditing
Software license audit services use cloud-based databases because they must be provisioned fast, loaded, and used for a month or less and retired. Such project-based services benefit significantly from database as a service because auditors can assure their clients that no competitor or vendor will be isolated from the project.
Food Service Retail
A large fast-food retailer moved all its data analysis services from an on-premises propriety data warehouse server to cloud-based services, saving millions in software licensing, hardware, and IT costs.
Compliance
Where data is stored falls under various compliance regulations for data protection and consumer privacy. Database as a service helps with requirements to keep data in region.
Disaster Recovery
Database as a service can ensure reliable backups to aid with disaster recovery in the cloud.
Actian Data Platform
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