Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
In a presentation that examined evolving data management trends, Quest Software's Jason Hall discussed three key trends in database management--multi/hybrid, open-source databases, and DevOps—in this clip from his presentation at Data Summit 2019.
"Our end users and our direct customers are kind of living in the world that IT organizations are setting out for their companies to get into and a lot of our conversations over the last several years have focused around these three themes," said Hall.
"My goal for this session is to one, get some head nods that your organizations are going through these same journeys; two, provide some context to show you that you're not alone; and then three, talk just real briefly about how we can help."
According to Hall, "We are all living in a multi-platform/hybrid, whatever you want to call it, data world; 15-20 years ago most of the conversations we had with IT shops, they would, they would tell us that we've got a singular data platform that we store all of our data in. You could've been a Oracle shop, a Db2 shop--whatever you were, you likely had a standard data technology that you made sure that all of your applications and use cases fit into. That doesn't happen anymore, right? Every once in a while we'll still run into those single-platform shops, but it's incredibly rare."
There are many reasons for this, he said, "but most organizations we go into these days, they've got lots of different database platforms, they've got some data on-prem, some data in the cloud, and their admin team kind of has to make that work, right? How do we manage these disconnected systems that could be located wherever they are? As a sub-component of that is the second bullet there around open source. And I incorrectly stated a few years back when I would give this presentation that open-source technologies are new and disruptive in the database world. And they're not. Open source is not new, open-source databases are not new, they've been around for dozens of years."
What is relatively new, though, he noted, "is enterprise IT shops trusting business-critical applications on open source technologies, right? You wouldn't have gone into the Fortune 100s of the world 10 years ago and see mission-critical applications running on PostgreSQL or MySQL, where now you are. So that's introduced some challenges about, yes, the software license is free when you use an open source technology, but that doesn't mean that the system is any less critical and how do we manage that?"
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And then there is the trend to DevOps or DataOps methodologies, he said. "The impact to our customers are relatively the same. You know, DevOps has, I think, unfortunately become very buzzword-y, and for good reason, right? There's a lot of benefit that it provides organizations around, you know, getting functionality and value into customers' hands as quickly as possible. The best definition that I've come across with DevOps is, was a gentleman at Microsoft named Donovan Brown. He is their Microsoft evangelist, or at least he was, I don't know if he still is and he has this Venn diagram and he says 'People, processes, and products.' And the middle is what's required to be successful at DevOps, and so some organizations are going to a organizational structure to embody DevOps. They're hiring and orchestrating their teams in a way to adopt those principles, but a lot of our customers today are trying to enable their existing staff in the seats that they sit in to be successful with DevOps, and so we like to talk about kind of the technologies and the products and the processes that we can enable to help those existing people be successful."
These are the key industry trends that Quest is seeing, he said. "Now, I often throw these three things up, and again, I'm hoping to get head nods and confirmation that these are things that your organizations are striving towards, or at least implementing today, and very often I get customers say, 'Well, what about security and compliance?' And so, of course that's a critical thing. None of this can happen at the expense of security and compliance. Most of us are going to be in verticals, you know, whether you're retail, or financial, or federal government, or insurance, or healthcare, whatever it is; we all have critical compliance objectives that have to be met, so that's a significant challenge."
Many presenters have made their slide decks available on the Data Summit 2019 website at www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2019/Presentations.aspx.
To access the full video of Hall's presentation, go to
https://datasummit.brightcovegallery.com/detail/videos/data-summit-2019-track-a/video/6040664778001/a201b.-quest-s-solutions-for-database-management-and-replication?autoStart=true#links