Data campaign

January 2021, IDC #US47176821 White Paper Enabling Database Excellence: Moving the Database to Managed Services Sponsored by: Amazon Web Services Carl W. Olofson January 2021 IN THIS WHITE PAPER Enterprise IT is undergoing massive transformation led by technologies that enable the virtualization, dynamic deployment, and elastic scalability of resources. Coupled with professional management services in the cloud, these technologies offer more control and cost-effective management of IT systems than has ever been seen before. This is particularly important in the database sphere. Without cloud managed database services, databases are managed manually through fixed compute and storage resources acquired for fixed periods and maintained by the datacenter staff. For decades, that was the only way to manage databases. But in recent years, an alternative has arisen, which is to move the database workload to a managed database service in the public cloud. In this way, while teams of professionals in the service do the work of provisioning and patching, the enterprise database staff can work to ensure that the data needs of the business are being met and that the data team can excel in supporting the enterprise mission. This white paper examines the issues involved in manually managing a database in the datacenter contrasted with either deploying a manually managed database in the cloud or subscribing to a managed cloud database service. It considers the benefits of moving to a managed cloud database service and provides actionable advice regarding how to proceed. SITUATION OVERVIEW Issues Involved in Database Management in an On-Premises Datacenter Managing databases in the datacenter has long been a challenge. Enterprises often overprovision to avoid being caught short of necessary resources for peak periods, resulting in wasted spending on database resources that may not be needed. They also often make mistakes configuring servers and storage, the settings of which must be constantly updated. Operations teams perform backups and system maintenance, and DBAs spend so much of their valuable time tuning the database that they are unable to provide the kind of direct support to developers and data analysts that they would like. Upgrade and security patches often go unapplied because the effort is too disruptive to datacenter operations, resulting in security vulnerabilities and software compatibility issues. Because configuration changes, including adding or expanding databases, are slow and costly, requiring considerable staff time and hardware investment, they are done slowly and deliberately. Development teams must wait for resources to become available for test databases, and the test

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