The rise of cloud platforms is changing how enterprises are thinking about data management and architecture.
With the promise of greater speed, scalability, and flexibility—as well as reduced CapEx costs—cloud adoption continues to accelerate.
At the same time, many enterprises are finding that traditional data management approaches are inadequate to handle the growing size and complexity of hybrid, multicloud environments.
From database management, to data integration and governance, modern approaches are becoming increasingly necessary to meet the demands of this new world.
DBTA held a webinar featuring Rob Reinauer, director of SQL product management, IDERA; Matthias Zieger, pre-sales engineer Central Europe, DACH, and Eastern Europe, Digital.ai; and Lenore Adam, director of product marketing, Delphix, who examined new solutions and emerging best practices.
According to Reinauer, cloud infrastructure offers an easy order of magnitude increase in productivity and agility. Much of the agility and velocity advantages accrue because development staff have the ability to implement changes directly.
However, SQL Server deployments to the public cloud introduces new complexities, and increased performance and data risks including:
- Performance and behavioral impacts and differences
- Data Security
- Certification of Regulatory Compliance
- Loss of the ultimate control of your data
- Potential for tool profusion and siloed monitoring environments
Cloud comes with its own risks as well. Modern cloud infrastructures expose all aspects of an incredibly complex execution environment. Migration of data and compute infrastructure to the cloud, can obviously magnify existing but undiagnosed vulnerabilities.
Within a corporate data center protected by firewalls, managed by experienced IT staff, misconfigured or under secured servers and storage often will have no impact what so ever.
Many areas of exposure are not known and will not be known until they are migrated to cloud infrastructure. The best practices and established IT procedures for Cloud deployed infrastructures are still evolving.
But the advantages of cloud are too compelling to ignore.
“CIOs need to ensure that their security teams are not holding back cloud initiatives with unsubstantiated cloud security worries,” said Reinauer. “Exaggerated fears can result in lost opportunity and inappropriate spending.”
When formulating a cloud computing strategy, organizations must make calculated decisions about what they will and will not do to mitigate cloud risks based on budget and risk appetite. Tools and automation are the key to managing cloud complexity. The costs for the risk mitigations should be included in the all up front cloud strategy.
Zieger suggested another way, database DevOps and DB automation. However, database DevOps/DB automation is still an obstacle for many teams cross industry.
What is needed is reductions in time from development to production by combining database deploy/release automation with the app release.
“Keep control and focus on the ‘What’—let machines and Software do the ‘How’,” Zeiger said.
Align DB deployments with app deployments in all stages and validate database changes.
According to Adam, companies need a multi-cloud approach with production and app development in the cloud.
The solution needs to be flexible, automated, independent and fast, and hole business value, Adam said. The Delphix Data platform offers programmable data infrastructure that can meet these needs. The solution can virtualize, mask, version, replicate, “time travel,” and automate.
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.